


In Through the Out Door

by sometimeswelose



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abuse, Abusive John Winchester, Angst, Canon Related, Canon-adjacent, Child Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dean Winchester Actually Deals With Feelings, Death, Fix-It, Grief, Healing, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Love, M/M, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Past Sex Work, Sam Knows, Sam Ships It, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Coercion, So much angst, Suicidal Ideation, Trauma, Underage Sex Work, basically all the content warnings, oops kinda turned into a, there at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:26:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28371600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sometimeswelose/pseuds/sometimeswelose
Summary: In which Dean is forced to deal with his trauma and come to a reckoning with himself. Also, Cas is there.See notes for more specific Content Warnings.*** *** ***"No one hates you as much as you do," Crowley told him once. That's Dean's whole M.O. right there. His two fundamental truths are that it is his job to save everyone, and that no matter how many people he saves it will never change the fact that he is 90% crap.Dean knows who he is. Yeah, he's done some good for the world, okay, he gets that. But deep down? The person he is inside is still worthless. Dean will never be good enough, never be any kind of role model. He's never going to shake that, so if that's what this whole seven trials angelic bullshit is about, then he and Cas might as well hold hands and drive off the cliff now.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 153
Kudos: 564
Collections: mp's favs





	1. Seven Stars & Seven Lampstands (Door Two)

**Author's Note:**

> **GENERAL WARNING: This is a shameless, completely unsubtle, "Dean is forced to confront his trauma" fic. It's not my intention here to cross the line into trauma porn or otherwise romanticize any of the violence that the characters have been through. The violence here is explicit, but much of the later events will be non-graphic and/or only implied. 
> 
> There are lots of unhealthy thought patterns that Dean has around his own memories, including a lot of victim-blaming. He's got a lot to work through. None of this is meant to be taken as what he "should" or "should not" think/feel about what he's been through. 
> 
> Also, as facing his own demons is the result of a spell (which, yes, is a tad heavy-handed), Dean's not really consenting to confronting any of this. This is obviously not supposed to represent a healthy course of therapy. 
> 
> This is very much a work about trauma. More specific Content Warnings for each chapter will be in the bottom notes. **

Like planets devoid of orbit, the irises of Dean Winchester's eyes are still and unseeing. They stay open, unblinking, disquieting, like the eyes of dead things. The green of them is always startling, but without the light behind them, they look wrong, glassy, just cold dead rocks floating in the vastness of space. 

Dean isn't dead. Not yet, anyway. 

Sam leans his elbows on the mattress, the mattress that faithfully remembers the shape of Dean, looking at his brother's slack face and prone form. Sam wears a lot of his sadness on his face these days. He's been different, ever since Hell. Who wouldn't be? Dean was different after Hell too, and he's different now, has been different ever since the mark, even now that it is no longer burning on his skin. But where Sam let all that pain and trauma turn him into something new, Dean was still trying to stuff all of that back into the same box of emotionally constipated, repressed self-hatred he'd been carrying his whole life. 

That box had never held together especially well to begin with. 

And isn't that more or less how they've ended up in this predicament in the first place? 

"How much time do we have?" Sam doesn't take his eyes away from Dean's face as he throws the question over his shoulder. 

"A few hours, I think." Cas' rough voice is emotionless, but Sam knows. 

Sam knows better than anyone, maybe even better than Dean himself, how much Cas cares. 

"Cas, this is taking too long." 

Cas is silent where he stands behind him, looming over his shoulder like the watchful guardian that he is. 

"I'm going in after him." 

"No." Cas steps up and places a hand on Sam's shoulder. It's not unwelcome, but these little touches of friendship and comfort are always a little awkward with Castiel. It seems normal and natural between Cas and Dean, Sam can see that, and he assumes that Cas is applying that logic of physical contact to Sam, because whatever it is that he has with Dean is his baseline for all human relationships. And Dean is too stupid about Cas to recognize that and teach him the things he needs to know about building other relationships. 

Dean being dense about Cas is also kind of how they got here, come to think of it. 

"Sam, I can't let you do that." 

Sam nods. "Yeah, I know. But we don't have much choice." 

Cas is silent for a long moment. Then: "I'll go." 

Sam looks away from Dean's face to peer up at Cas. He's still gazing past Sam, towards Dean's bed, his face drawn in a weariness that has become second nature. 

"It should be me. Dean would want it to be me." 

"Dean would want you to be safe. If I put you under and send you through into his head, I can't protect you." 

"I'll be fine," Sam says. This is almost always a lie, but he's used to saying it. "We've taken bigger risks." 

"You may be. But your own consciousness might influence Dean's, and if he can't sort through his own memories, his real memories, he won't be able to get back. If your memories get tangled up with his…" Cas shakes his head. "Both of you could be lost in there." 

"And your memories wouldn't interfere?" 

"No," Cas says shortly. "I'm an angel. I'd have to translate my memories out of their true form for them to even be compatible. They won't touch Dean's." 

Sam rubs his left hand with his right, his thumb automatically pressing into the scar on his palm, the point of pain that kept him tethered to reality for a long time. 

He knows his own mind. There are things in there that aren't… sane. There are memories in the darkness of the cage that could rip the most stable person to shreds. There's the demon blood, even now, in his veins. He will always be unclean. 

And Dean is not, of all things, stable. Not now. Not for a long time. 

There is the problem of Dean, though. Waking Dean, that is. Sam is pretty sure Dean will never forgive him if he lets someone else go traipsing through his head. True, he'd hate the idea of Sam in there, but they'd work through that. Sam knows the darkness is deep in Dean too, but they'd work through whatever Sam saw. 

Or at least, Sam would work through it, and Dean would drink and pretend it never happened. 

It took Sam a long time to let go of his anger about Dean giving permission for an angel to use him as a vessel. This is Cas, so it's different, but Sam knows better than anyone, afterall, how much Dean would hate the idea of Cas seeing his darkest secrets. 

It's a cruel spell. 

If Dean had just listened in the first place… but no, he had to go charging into that sanctuary and tip the angelic tripwire, and now here they are with Dean's consciousness trapped in some hell dimension while his body slowly loses its life-force. 

Seven Stars and Seven Lampstands and Seven Doors. It's all very Revelations-End-of-Days metaphorical, which irritates Sam on another, shallow level because, well, been there. Done that. 

True, the sanctuary hadn't been touched in a century, so it's not surprising no one had updated their curses to be a little more on top of the zeitgeist, but Sam's had enough of the damn apocalypse to last a lifetime. 

_Through seven doors shall he pass, and not until the last will he make of himself a man worthy to set foot in my kingdom. Glory be to he who slays the demons of his own making, and woe to the guilty, who shall be damned to live out of the light. Sorrow to the weak of will too, for he shall find the doors as unpassable as the guilty, and he too shall languish in the shadows._

_But he who conquers, he who comes through unto the Truth beyond the last door, to him will I give Myself. Hear me, for I am the Lord your God._

It reminds Sam of Osiris, of Dean being judged and found wanting. At least with Sam there, maybe he'd had a fighting chance of seeing himself as worthy of something. If Cas is right and each of the seven doors is a test, a level of personal hell, of confronting one's worst memories and darkest secrets, then Sam is not sure Dean will make it. He should have woken up on his own by now. 

"Come on, Dean," Sam mutters. But he knows, has known in a spike of cold dread to his very marrow, that the one enemy his brother cannot beat is himself. 

Cas abruptly lets go of Sam's shoulder and shrugs off his trenchcoat. He takes off his shoes, then his jacket and tie. 

"Uh, Cas," Sam says as Castiel moves around to sit on the other side of the bed, where there is more space. "What are you doing?" 

Cas blinks, looks at Sam quizzically as if his actions are obvious. "I don't normally sleep, but I understand that it's customary not to wear one's outer clothes in bed. When I go under, I will be as unconscious as Dean. So. I didn't want to be rude and wear shoes to his bed." 

Cas is as bad as Dean. 

Well, no. He's not. It's not his fault he's clueless about this sort of thing. But hell, if he's about to go climbing into Dean's brain, Sam isn't going to stop him getting in bed with him. 

Besides, if Dean isn't completely broken when he comes back, his utter panic about it will be a little bit delightful to watch. 

The two of them are fools. 

"What should I do?" Sam asks. 

"Set a timer for two hours. If I haven't pulled Dean out by then, you can try this." Cas finds an old takeout container on the floor and hastily sketches a symbol onto the side, using one of Dean's bedside knives to carve it in. Sam takes the box, looking at the Enochian symbol for _calling. Return. The blowing of the horn._

Cas shrugs. "It might work." He doesn't sound hopeful. 

"Okay. Yeah." 

Sam puts the box aside and pulls out his phone, setting a timer for two hours. Cas lays down, not touching Dean, but level with him. 

"Hey, Cas, wait." Sam clears his throat. "Uh. Look, whatever you see…" 

Cas' eyes are understanding. "I know Dean won't like it, Sam. But I'm not afraid of his secrets." 

Sam wants to tell him that maybe he should be, maybe they should all be a little afraid of Dean's nightmares. But Cas has already turned slightly towards Dean. He places two fingers to Dean's temple, and then Cas is out. His hand slips back to the bed, and his eyes are closed, but there is the same unnatural stillness in his body. He has gone in search of the darkness. 

***

Dean is sitting on the cold, mildewy floor with his back to the wall. It's gloomy in this circular room, the light flickering from slits far above him in the high ceiling. His fingertips are cold, but he doesn't tuck them in his pockets or do anything else about it. He just keeps bouncing a blue plastic ball against the floor, staring into the middle distance. 

There are seven doors in this room. One of them has an X burned above it and the door is turned black. The others are innocuous. Where the X is over the first door they are numbered 2-7. 

Dean gets it. 

He's just not going to do it. 

They can't make him. He's fine where he is, thanks. 

The only sound in the room is Dean's breaths and the ball hitting the floor. It's gloomy and dank and smells like mold, but Dean's seen worse. 

When there is that all too familiar rustle, and Castiel suddenly appears in front of him, Dean startles, grabbing the ball instinctively, the only item he has at his disposal. 

"Cas?" 

"Hello Dean," Cas says, looking around the room, taking it in. 

"The hell are you doing here?" Dean scrambles to his feet. He was pretty sure this was a nightmare. Positive, even. It couldn't be real. 

But… right. Cas has visited his dreams before. 

"You were taking too long," Cas says bluntly, turning back to Dean. 

Cas is glowing a little bit. Like Dean can see his grace here. 

"Taking too long?" Dean frowns. "Come on, I've been here like…" He was going to say "ten minutes", but now that Dean thinks about it he has no idea. Going through the first door and what was on the other side of it, sure, that might have taken a little time, but he's only been back in this room for a short while. He thinks. Maybe. 

"It's been five hours, Dean." Cas' voice is low. "We're running out of time." 

Dean remembers hitting the magical tripwire in that damn sanctuary, the near-electric current that went up his body. He'd felt himself going rigid before he hit the floor, and then he'd opened his eyes here. 

Dean can put two and two together. He knows about getting trapped in one's own head, about African dream root and Djinns and all the other crap that likes to go waltzing through the tulips of the mind. 

He'd recognized that he would, eventually, have to go through those other doors. He just… 

"Dammit," Dean mutters. He runs a hand through his hair reflexively. "How much time is left then?" 

"I'm not sure. Another couple of hours, I would guess." 

Cas sees the first door and frowns, taking in the X and the way the wood of the door is streaked with black burns, the way the handle is smeared with soot. 

"What was behind the first door?"

"Hell," Dean says shortly. Cas nods and fixes the uncanny blue of his eyes back on Dean. 

"You understand what you have to do," Cas says. It's not a question. "Seven doors, seven demons of your past, as it were, to conquer, before you can "set foot in the kingdom of the Lord."" Cas is getting better at air-quotes. "If you don't, you'll stay trapped here and your body will die." 

Dean swallows. He knows all this. "So what, I hit some angel booby trap that wants to give me exposure therapy? Is that it?" 

Dean's trying to get pissed, because the anger is usually what gets him through. 

"I suspect the intention was for those who are guilty to face their crimes, to prevent anyone unworthy from entering the sanctuary," Cas says mildly. "Tedious and a bit arcane, but not ineffective." 

"Great." Dean runs his hand through his hair. "Just great." 

"Dean, you are not one of the unworthy." Cas steps closer to him, too close. "I know you're afraid to face yourself, but-" 

"Whoa, hey, Dr. Phil." Dean puts his hands up and backs out of Cas' space. "None of that crap. I'm fine. I'll do it. I just didn't realize the time lapse, okay?" 

Cas' expression is one of gentle understanding, so Dean looks away, stares blankly at door number two. 

"I'll come with you," Cas says. He says it the way he always does, like it's obvious and inevitable. 

"No," Dean says. "No way. Thanks for popping in, Cas, but you gotta get out of my head. I don't need you here for this." 

"I'm sorry, Dean. I know these are your secrets, but you aren't…" Cas stops. 

And there's the anger Dean was looking for. 

"I'm not what?" Dean's voice is dangerous and low. "Not strong enough? It's my own goddamn head, Cas! It's all crap I'm already living with." 

"But not crap you've dealt with." Cas isn't trying to be cruel, with his blunt, matter of fact words. Dean knows that, but it still stings. "You keep it all locked up and you never… You never let anyone help you." 

"I don't need you to hold my hand," Dean snaps. "I'm fine." 

"No, you're not." Cas looks at him sadly, almost those same puppy-eyes that Sam gives him. "I'm sorry," he says again. "Sam wanted to be the one to come, but the spell… it might have been compromised by another human consciousness. And we don't have time for complications. We need to move, Dean." 

If he's being honest with himself, which he isn't, Dean's not sure if having Sam here would have been any better than having Cas. Sam already knows most of the worst parts of Dean, but not… not everything. And if he had to know, okay, they could get through that, but Dean doesn't want Sammy to watch. There are things he's always protected Sam from - not just the monsters in their lives, but the harsh, unsympathetic world of poverty, pain, and hard choices. 

He can't stand the thought of Cas seeing him at his lowest, his most broken, but at least Cas isn't his kid brother. At least Dean knows intellectually that Cas has been around for millenia and seen all the filth that humanity has to offer. It's nothing Cas hasn't seen before. So what if Cas can't look at him after this? So what if he knows that Dean… 

Dean swallows. "I'm serious, Cas. I need you to leave." 

Cas sighs. He shoves his hands into his pocket and gets that distinctly shifty look on his face. Cas is a terrible liar. 

"Cas?" 

"I… Uh." 

Dean swears. "What the hell did you do?" 

"I'm afraid I can't leave. I'm in your head, and right now there are no exits here." 

"Dammit, Cas! You shouldn't have come. If I get you killed…" 

"You're not going to get me killed, because you're going to walk through those doors." Cas gestures at the six unopened doors. "And we're going to deal with whatever's behind them. Just… let me help you, Dean." 

It's not that simple. It's never been that simple. 

_No one hates you as much as you do_ , Crowley told him once. That's Dean's whole M.O. right there. His two fundamental truths are that it is his job to save everyone, and that no matter how many people he saves it will never change the fact that he is 90% crap. 

Dean knows who he is. Yeah, he's done some good for the world, okay, he gets that. But deep down? The person he is inside is still worthless. Dean will never be good enough, never be any kind of role model. He's never going to shake that, do if that's what this whole seven trials angelic bullshit is about, then he and Cas might as well hold hands and drive off the cliff now. 

"You're not going to like what you see," Dean says. His voice comes out almost as gravelly as Cas'. He walks over to the door with the number 2 above it and puts his hand on the knob. In his other hand he's still clutching the blue ball that rolled out when he'd first open this door. The ball that had made him shut it again immediately, his heart beating so fast it made him dizzy. 

Dean hesitates another second, turns halfway back. "Cas. Just..." 

"I would never tell anyone your secrets without your permission," Cas says. "Not even Sam." 

Dean swallows again. His mouth is dry. 

He doesn't say anything else, just pushes the door open. 

They're in a motel. It's like every other motel Dean's ever been in. The walls are tan, the baseboards off-white. The heater rattles noisily in the corner. It smells like cleaning agent and stale smoke. They still let you smoke in most rooms in 1983. 

Four-year-old Dean is sitting with his back against one of the tan walls. He's still in his pajamas, his hair disheveled, his eyes red-rimmed. 

Dean - the now Dean - drops the blue ball back into four-year-old Dean's hands, where it belongs, and backs up to the farthest edge of the memory. He leans back against the window and crosses his arms over his chest. Cas stays by his side, and Dean doesn't look at him. 

Instead, Dean's eyes go to the bed, and… 

Dean's heart breaks. He knows that's not the point of this memory, knows what's coming, but Sammy is laying in the middle of the twin-mattress, wrapped up in a blanket like a baby burrito, with a motel pillow propped on other side of his tiny body to keep him from rolling too far in his sleep. 

God. Six months old. He's so small. So innocent. Dean feels exactly the rush of love and anxiety he used to feel looking at his brother. He'd die to protect this baby. He'd do anything to keep him safe. That was his job. 

It's so weird to see baby Sam. Dean wants to pick him up and hold him, and that makes him feel all kind of weird paternal things he doesn't know what to do with. It makes his chest ache to think what this baby is going to go through, all of the ways that Dean is going to fail him. 

Dean's not going to cry. They haven't even gotten to the climax of this memory yet. He's not going to cry from the love he feels for his sleeping baby brother. 

Four-year-old Dean is bouncing the blue ball off the wall across from him, in the space between the two beds. A deputy at the police station had handed Dean the ball while they were waiting, while dad was back in a room with the deputy. Dean could hear his father crying from down the hall. He'd held his brother tight in his arms and shushed him, the way he'd seen mom do a hundred times. 

Now-Dean looks at his younger self properly. He feels a mixture of protectiveness and pity, and maybe some small amount of disgust. He was so young. He doesn't remember ever being this young. 

Dean glances at Cas. Cas is also staring at four-year-old Dean, but his expression is… 

Cas is looking at the younger Dean with undisguised wonder. It's a gentle sadness, an aching sweetness. It's not gross or creepy or anything, Dean knows well enough what that looks like, it's just… tender. Cas is looking at Dean the way Dean must have been looking at Sam. It's the way you look at someone you love when you think they're not watching. 

Dean does not possibly know what to do with that kind of affection, so he ignores it. Cas is a weird dude. Maybe it's just like wondering what an adopted dog looked like when it was a puppy, or something. Maybe he's also feeling protective. 

If so, Dean thinks with a full sense of the irony, too bad for him. 

There's a sound of the toilet flushing in the motel bathroom, the water running in the sink, and then John emerges. 

He looks wrecked. His eyes are bloodshot and the purple circles beneath them are half-moon bruises. The last twenty-four hours have aged John well into the next decade. He looks completely untethered. 

The old sense of self-preservation nudges at now-Dean, that internal barometer he developed for anticipating his father's moods. He wants to yell at his younger self to take Sammy and go outside, just let John sleep it off in peace. But of course this is just a memory, and young Dean is clueless. 

John goes to the empty bed and sinks onto it. He looks like a shell of a man. It's worse than Dean remembers, actually. He can see the shaking in his dad's hands, see the lines deepening in the circles beneath his eyes, see the way he is looking at his empty hands like he doesn't know what to do with them. Only Sammy has gotten any sleep. 

Dean doesn't remember his dad changing this fast. 

Four-year-old Dean is still bouncing the ball off the wall as John lowers his face into his trembling hands. 

For an indeterminable stretch of time, there is just the creaking noises of the older heater and the thud of the ball. 

"Dean," John says at last, his voice flat. "Cut it out." 

Four-year-old Dean looks up. His hair is shaggier than it's ever been since. His face is so… it's not innocent, not any more. That change happened just as fast for him. But it's still too trusting. 

Young Dean's hands tighten on the ball. The repetitive movement was an act of self-soothing. It was a grounding thing. He struggles for a few minutes, squeezing and squeezing his fist around the ball, before the oppressive silence in the room is too much for the four-year-old and he starts bouncing the ball again. 

John stands up, and now-Dean thinks how stupid his younger self was not to recognize the warning signs, not to just curl up in the corner and make himself as small and quiet as possible. 

"Did you hear me when I said to cut it out?" John rips the ball out of young Dean's hands and throws it across the room. It thuds in to the door louder than anything Dean had done. 

John backhands him across the face and it makes an audible *smack* that rings in the small room.

"When I give you an order, you follow it. You understand me, boy?" 

John's hand leaves a red mark on four-year-old Dean's face, and the boy reaches up to touch his cheek, staring up at his dad with his eyes wide. 

John shakes him by the shirtfront. "I said, do you understand me?" 

"Y-yes, sir," four-year-old Dean says, and, God, it's a child's voice. Now-Dean winces, hearing it. It's the voice more than anything that makes him realize how young, how fucking vulnerable he was. 

It's the day after mom died. It's the first time John's ever hit him. 

From the bed, Sammy starts crying. 

The memory dissolves, twists, reshapes itself into another motel. This one has off-white walls and tan baseboards. 

Dean sucks in a breath. He knows what this is too. There's no time between scenes to process and he's… 

Four-year-old Dean had looked so confused, like he hadn't expected to be hit, like he didn't even understand why it had happened, what he'd done to deserve it. And adult Dean can't… The thing is, adult Dean can't just watch a child get hit and say he had it coming. Not even when he's that child. 

He's always seen his memories from the inside looking out, always conceptualized himself as one continuous person, one long running series of fuck-ups. He doesn't think of himself as a child. He never has. 

Outside looking in, it's harder to deny that that Dean was just a boy. It was just a ball. 

"What happened after?" 

Dean jumps. He forgot about Cas. Cas is still standing at his side in this second motel where, currently, a ten-year-old Sam is laying on one bed reading a book, and a fourteen-year-old Dean is fieldstripping guns and cleaning knives, tossing them back into a giant green duffle bag as he finishes them. 

"What?" Dean says, distracted. 

"After the last memory," Cas says gently. Dean grits his teeth. He doesn't like people being gentle with him. It feels too much like pity, or like they think he's fragile. And maybe Cas does think that, since he and Sam clearly didn't think Dean could get through this on his own, but fuck him. Fuck them both. Dean's not a child anymore. He doesn't need anyone to pat him on the back and tell him he's a good little boy. This was his life. He's used to it. 

"After Sammy woke up, I couldn't get him to stop crying. I thought maybe he was hungry, I sure was, so dad went out to the store to pick up baby formula." Dean had forgotten about this part but he remembers now. He laughs bitterly and rubs the back of his neck. "He, uh, he came back with baby formula and two six packs. It took him two days to think about food." 

Dean had been so hungry, but after that first night he wasn't going to bring it up. He'd just made sure Sammy was fed and tried to ignore the new sensation of his gnawing stomach. 

Cas' expression is understanding. Kind. He looks about two seconds away from asking "And how did that make you feel?" 

Dean turns away from him, looks out at the room. He can still feel Cas' eyes on him. "Stop looking at me, man." 

"My apologies about my eyes," Cas says. 

Dean thinks this is Cas being sardonic, but it's always hard to tell with him. 

Fourteen-year-old Dean really does a number on now-Dean. He doesn't have any pictures from around this time - why would he? - and he forgot that he looked like _that._

Fourteen-year-old Dean is in the middle of a growth spurt so he's all stretched out and kind of skinny, no real meat on him yet. Too much running, not enough calories. His t-shirt is too big and it hangs loosely off his shoulders which are beginning to broaden out, but only just beginning. The baggy shirt only makes him look smaller, but now-Dean remembers why he'd started wearing his dad's old shirts around this time, why he'd been trying to hide his body. 

Fourteen-year-old Dean is almost obscenely pretty. Now-Dean gets it in a way that he hates, a way that turns his stomach to think about. He remembers something else he hasn't thought about in years, the grown man with liquor on his breath who'd stopped Dean outside a bar where he was working his pool hustle, stopped with a hand on his shoulder, crowding his space, and said "Look at you, sweetheart, you shouldn't be _allowed_." 

Dean had put an elbow in his gut and gone on his merry way, but… he gets it. He hates it, but his fourteen-year-old self was all eyelashes and big green doe eyes, all freckles and a smooth jawline. His cheeks are hollow and he has this kind of permanent haunted look to him, which just makes him a little tragic. His face is too feminine, his torso too lean. Now-Dean hates it. He hates it. He hates seeing himself like this. God, it makes him want to slap himself, yell at him to be more of a man, to get harder before the world makes that choice for him. 

But… It's… 

That's John's voice, now-Dean realizes with a sinking, somewhat guilty feeling. John's voice telling him to toughen up - as if this fourteen-year-old Dean isn't tough just because his face looks like _that._ As if fourteen-year-old Dean hasn't killed all sorts of monsters single-handed, hasn't proven himself in a fight over and over again. As if fourteen-year-old Dean isn't making nearly every damn sacrifice in the books for his family at this point. The things he's done, the things he's seen… 

Fourteen-year-old Dean is pretty, yeah, and he has his weaknesses, but he's not weak. 

Dean can't help glancing at Cas to see what his reaction is to this teenage-twink version of Dean, but Cas' expression is just a sadder version of the tenderness he wore around four-year-old Dean. He looks straight through young Dean exactly the way he looks through now-Dean, sometimes. Like he can see every crack in his soul. 

Dean turns away hastily. Still, he can't help the slight relief that Cas doesn't seem disgusted or, worse, desirous. 

Not that he would, not that he's ever... but Dean's getting thrown around in the emotional whiplash of these memories and he can't… 

John bangs into the motel room from outside and fourteen-year-old Dean sits up straighter automatically. Sam looks up from his book, his face wary. 

"Pack up," John says. "Demon's exorcised, but we have a bogie on our tail. One of the cops I talked to earlier followed me from the bar. Lost him before I got here, but it's time to change plates and shake." 

Fourteen-year-old Dean hastily shoves the last of the weapons into the duffel bag and sweeps up the clothes on the floor from yesterday. John rifles through the bag he left on the nightstand and pulls out a set of Arkansas license plates. 

"Get your toothbrush, Sammy," Dean says to his brother, who hasn't moved from the bed. Sam is frowning down at his book, but at Dean's words he sighs and tosses it into his own bag. While he's grabbing their toiletries, Dean turns to their dad to ask him something, and that's when he realizes. 

Now-Dean can't smell John's breath from where he and Cas are standing near the motel room window, but Dean remembers. He remembers it was whiskey practically coming out of John's pores. And hey, Dean's no saint. A couple of beers, yeah, he knows it's bad, knows it's not safe, but he's made the calculated risk to drive tipsy before. 

If it had just been beer on his dad's breath… if he hadn't just said "followed me from the bar," which meant he'd just come from drinking, which meant, from Dean's calculations over the years, that not only was John still drunk, he likely hadn't even hit the worst of it yet. 

Fourteen-year-old Dean quietly takes the Arkansas plates while John is zipping up his bag, and when Sam comes out of the bathroom he hands them to him. 

"Hey, Sammy, go out and change the plates, would you? Dad and I will be right out." 

Sam narrows his eyes at his brother. Dean pushes his shoulder, rolling his eyes and keeping an easy smile on his face. "Go on, bitch. We'll be there in a sec." 

Sam goes, reluctance clear in the way he shoots a glance back over his shoulder at the door. Now-Dean's heart aches for this Sammy too. Young Dean ignores him. 

When it's just him and John, fourteen-year-old Dean turns to him and says, casually, "Hey, dad, could I drive today?" 

John's checking the messages on one of his burner phones. He doesn't look up. 

"Maybe later, Dean. We can switch when we outside Ohio. I wanna be sure we're not followed." 

Fourteen-year-old Dean takes a deep breath. He glances through now-Dean and Cas, looking out the window toward where Sam is screwing on the new plates to the Impala. Not at all suspicious activity for a ten-year-old. 

But now-Dean knows what his teenage self is thinking: Sam will be in the car. 

It's the only reason he does it. It's the only reason teenage Dean does anything. He would have let John drive them off a cliff long ago if he wasn't looking out for Sam. 

"I can make sure we're not tailed. It… it'd be good to have the practice." 

"I said no, Dean." 

Fourteen-year-old Dean visibly braces himself. He knows what's coming, and he does it anyway. He's pretty, but he's tough. 

"Please, dad. Let me drive." 

John looks up, finally. His face gets blotchy when he's mad-drunk. "Excuse me?" 

Fourteen-year-old Dean meets his gaze for a minute before dropping his eyes to the carpet. 

"You've had a long day," he mumbles. "I just thought… it'd give you the chance to - to get some rest." 

"You got something you want to say, boy?" 

John's eyes are glossy but burning. 

Dean doesn't take his eyes off the floor. "How much did you have to drink, dad?" 

The blow hits Dean across the face and he staggers back, putting up an arm instinctively so that the next one cracks against his bare forearm. 

"You think I don't know when I'm safe to drive? You think I'd put my family in danger for something so stupid?" John's neck and face are red. "You think you know better than me? Huh? Well, do you? Answer me!" 

"No, sir." Dean's mouth smarts where his dad's fist connected. "I just… I just…" 

"You just? What? You fall in line." 

Fourteen-year-old Dean swallows and straightens his spine. "Dad-" 

John pushes him hard against the wall. Another blow lands on his arm. And then one to his gut. Dean doubles over, putting up his hands simultaneously. 

It's nauseating to watch. 

Now-Dean sneaks a glance at Cas, because he can't help it. He's surprised to see that Cas' own fists are clenched at his sides, the tenderness gone from his face. He's glowing a little more brightly, like his grace is bursting to be used. 

It's… 

Dean doesn't know how to feel about Cas wanting to protect fourteen-year-old Dean from John. Four-year-old Dean was one thing, but he's a teenager here. He's not helpless. 

But then again, what was he supposed to do? Fight back? Shoot his dad? Risk his dad ditching him somewhere for good, taking Sam and driving away forever? 

"Dad, please." 

Now-Dean hates that too, hates the desperation in his younger self's voice, the begging. He was always begging John for something - to stop, to stay, to come back. 

John stops, his hand still raised, panting, looking down at Dean like he's vile - no, worse than that, like he's nothing. 

The silence hangs between them for a long time, Dean keeping his palms spread out before him, submissive, tensed and waiting. 

Then John swears. He fumbles in his pocket and throws the keys to the Impala at Dean's chest. Dean catches them instinctively and looks up at John, but his dad doesn't meet his eyes. He steps back from Dean and shakes his head. 

"I'm gonna use the bathroom. Have the car started and ready to go." John's voice is clipped, empty. He pauses at the door to the motel bathroom though and says "You look just like your mother, you know." 

Now-Dean doesn't have to look at his own face to know that that one bites deep. It's a confused flush in his chest because he loves mom, knows that dad still loves mom, but it's just another way John has pointed out how _effeminate_ Dean is. And John has pointed it out plenty. 

Fourteen-year-old Dean doesn't respond. He waits until the door to the bathroom shuts, then hurries out to the Impala. 

Now-Dean and Cas follow him - Dean doesn't really make the choice to do it, he's just pulled along with his own memory. When young Dean gets into the driver's seat, Cas and now-Dean slide into the backseat next to Sam. 

Sam is glaring daggers at fourteen-year-old Dean's reflection in the rear view mirror. Dean glances up and notices, half-turns in his seat while he's starting the car. 

"What?" 

"You're bleeding," Sam says flatly. He looks frankly murderous. The Dean sitting next to the memory of his ten-year-old brother in the backseat can't help but feel a surge of affection for him. 

Fourteen-year-old Dean momentarily adjusts the rear view mirror, taking in his split lip and the red mark across his cheek that is going to fade into a bruise by that afternoon. He runs his tongue over the drop of blood on his bottom lip. The taste of iron is familiar, par for the course. 

"Hey, no biggie," Dean says, because he can't hide this one from Sammy, can't say it happened on a hunt or that he tripped or walked into a door. He's used all those excuses and more over the years, but Sam knows more than he should. 

Sam leans forward, the anger in his face mixed with something desperate enough to make now-Dean's heart ache for him. 

"Dean, let's go. Now. Drive off now, before dad comes out." 

Fourteen-year-old Dean turns to the backseat again. "What? Are you crazy?" 

"Yeah, maybe, but let's do it. Come on. We've got a full tank of gas, we can get a few states over and then pick up a new car. We could do it, now, today." 

"Sam, Jesus, what are you talking about? We're not gonna just ditch dad." 

" _Dean_." Sam's voice is urgent, exasperated, touched with pleading. "We should do it. We should just go. Come on, please, just drive." 

"You're out of your mind, man. We're not bailing on dad." 

"So what, you're just going to let him beat on you forever?" Sam sounds somewhere between close to crying and like he might like to punch Dean himself. "We can get out of here. For good." 

Dean turns back around in the driver's seat, shoulders squared. He touches two fingers to his swollen lip. 

"He doesn't mean anything by it," he says quietly. 

"Jesus fucking christ, Dean." 

It's almost funny to hear ten-year-old Sammy swear like that. 

"Hey, Sammy, it's fine. Okay? Really, I'm fine. I've had a lot worse. Remember last month, that alligator thing in Georgia? That thing's tail could pack a punch." Dean smiles in the rearview mirror. It stretches his cut lip, but Dean ignores the sting. "Come on, cheer up, Sam. How about in the next town, you and I grab some grub, find the nearest woods, and just go for a hike. Huh? No hunting, no target practice, we'll just do your hippie-dippie one-with-nature thing." 

Sam slumps back into his seat as John comes out of the motel room, bag slung over his shoulder. 

John gets into the passenger seat, not looking at Dean. He notices the way Sam is glaring at the back of his head though. 

"Something the matter, Sam?" 

Sam meets Dean's pleading eyes in the rearview mirror again and his shoulders sag, the defiance going out of him, anger turning to bitterness. 

"No sir," he says. 

Dean pulls out of the motel's parking lot. 

  
  


"Don't," now-Dean says as the memory blurs again. He can feel the way Cas is looking at him. 

"I didn't say anything," Cas says. 

"Yeah. Keep it that way." 

Dean’s not stupid. He knows he’s got daddy issues or whatever. He knows, in an intellectual, adult sort of way that John’s treatment of him had sometimes crossed over into abuse. He knows that if he had a kid, he wouldn’t raise them like this. 

“He was doing the best he could,” Dean says, as the air around them turns hot and arid, a shimmering asphalt parking lot forming beneath their feet. The words come out rote, the line he’s said a hundred times. Dean believes it. In his heart of heart, he truly believes John was doing everything he could to protect his boys, raise them right. It’s just… 

How do you say that a parent’s best wasn’t good enough? 

Dean can practically hear Cas biting his tongue. 

No one is supposed to see this shit. This is supposed to be part of the whole Dean Winchester package, the quiet tragic mystery, the backstory of unsaid trauma, the understanding that he is a skin suit wrapped around some nameless darkness. You peel back those layers, and Dean’s not the troubled hero anymore. When you actually get to it, his trauma isn’t _interesting._ It isn’t entertainment. The things that made him the way that he is, they’re just… 

If Dean is supposed to lay all of his fucking emotions out for this place, if he’s supposed to resolve everything that’s ever gone wrong in his past, then they are shit out of luck. There is no amount of time that is going to be enough for him to come to terms with it all. 

It takes Dean a second to realize where they are this time, and his gut churns. Past the parking lot, he can see the orange-tinted sand and the green dots of cacti poking up from the unfriendly ground. 

“Okay,” Dean says, turning his head up to the big blue sky above them. It’s hot as hell, even in this memory-scape. “I get it, okay? What do you want me to say? I didn’t deserve to get beat up? Fine, I get it. Next issue, please.” 

Nothing happens. He didn’t really expect it to, but it was worth a shot. Anything to avoid… this. 

“How did you get out of the last one?” Cas asks. He’s looking around in interest, apparently unphased by the heat, even in his trenchcoat. 

A sixteen-year-old Dean is leaning against the trunk of the Impala, twisting his hands together. He’s filled out a little in the last two years. He’s still too pretty for a hunter, but his jawline is sharp and has a little stubble, his shoulders broader, his muscles bigger. His hair is cropped short, normally it’s mussed in the front with gel, but it’s clear this Dean hasn’t showered in a few days and his hair is lank and greasy. There are shadows under his eyes. The sun in this place has given him more freckles than usual. They stand out on his face and hands, little constellations from spending so much time outside the last few days, searching. 

Now-Dean takes a deep breath. He’s distracted by this Dean. This Dean is much closer to how he remembers himself, how he still sees himself sometimes. He’s always thought of this Dean as fully grown, fully capable of handling himself, handling anything. But outside, looking in, he can see the hollowness in him, the fear in his own eyes. 

He was just a dumb kid, Dean thinks, somewhat shocked again at the realization. Sixteen. Jesus. He’d been so fucking cocky, plastered on a persona that was so damn sure of himself. And he had been a good hunter - hell, a great hunter. Dad even let him take low-stakes hunts on his own. Dad trusted him. And that had felt… 

“I…” 

“Dean?”

Now-Dean tears his eyes away and looks at Cas instead. Cas’ eyes are steady, his expression still one of too much understanding. 

“I just…” Dean rubs his forehead. The visions of Hell behind door number one had been brutal. Everything that had been done to Dean, everything that Dean had done to others. He’d been numb at first, watching it happen, but the thing about those memories was that they were in _Hell._

Everyone knew that he’d been to Hell, been through Hell. If he woke up gasping from nightmares about it, that was something he could explain. It was something people would get. Dean isn’t okay with what happened there. He’ll never be okay with it. But the point is that it happened, and those forty years exist in a space in his head reserved especially for them. Hell was Hell, and life was life. He can compartmentalize. 

Dean doesn’t forgive himself for the things that he did. He is never going to feel absolved. But at least he can separate Hell Dean from the choices he makes in his life. A man does desperate, horrible things in eternal damnation. 

“I don’t know, man.” Dean shuts his eyes, just for a moment. “I went through it and then the door like, spat me back out into that room and I felt like, you know, it wasn’t great, but I see that shit all the time. I don’t need a magical “worst of” recap to tell me what I already know about Hell. I told you, I’m coping.” 

“And with this?” 

“With this, I… I’m…” 

This is a motif in Dean’s life; the demon version of himself that he’d dreamed of long before he’d ever become one for real calling him “daddy’s blunt little instrument”, Agent Hendrickson saying “I’m sorry your daddy touched you in a bad place,” the sad look in Sam’s eyes whenever Dean makes an offhand comment about Dad. 

Dean’s not fucking stupid. He gets why this one is different. He gets that having no one to protect him since the age of four, growing up too fast, being put into this position to be both a father and a mother to Sammy, a soldier and a replacement partner to John, he gets that this has fucked him up. This was just life, crummy, dirty, exhausting life. 

He remembers standing in an empty warehouse with Sam, talking his brother down, trying to get him to see the difference between his hallucinations and reality. That’s what all of this is. It’s real in a way that Hell could never be. It’s different. It’s in everything that he ever was, everything that he still is. Even if he could intellectualize it, how is he supposed to compartmentalize what has been the fabric of his being for almost his entire life? 

“Let’s just get this over with, okay?” Dean says, like he has any control over the memory. Cas nods, slowly, looking Dean over with his kind blue eyes. 

No one is supposed to see this. 

It’s Flagstaff, Arizona, and Sam is missing. 

Dean has looked everywhere for him. He’s stopped checking warehouses and motels and started calling hospitals and morgues. He’s stopped just short of filing a missing person’s report, because all that would do is raise questions about where the parents of this missing twelve-year-old are. 

Sixteen-year-old Dean, standing in the parking lot sweating under his usual protective layer of flannel, just got the call from John saying he was back at the motel. Dean hasn’t told him yet, couldn’t bring himself to call him over the phone and confess his failure. He’d been holding on to a desperate hope that he could find Sam, or that Sam would come back on his own. 

It’s been almost two weeks now, and Dean is pretty sure Sam’s dead. 

Why else would he leave like this? Sam has talked about running away before, yeah, but he always tried to convince Dean to come with him. He always talked about it as them both getting out. Dean can’t believe that Sam, Sam of all people, would abandon him. 

Sixteen-year-old Dean finally gets off the Impala and walks into the motel, now-Dean following numbly, Cas at his side. 

And… 

Now-Dean watches it all unfold, numb again. This is probably the worst of it, what this place has to show him. 

John Winchester is not a bad man. Dean believes that. Most of what he did was disciplinary, necessary, if hard-handed. Sometimes he was drunk, and those were the beatings that he obviously felt guilty about, the ones that maybe Dean hadn’t deserved. They never talked about it, but John always did something trying to make it up to him, giving him the keys to the Impala, taking him out shooting, letting him drink a beer with him. 

For Dean, it was the sober ones that were worse. 

John’s anger is blinding, as sixteen-year-old Dean confesses that he’s lost his little brother, his shoulders hunched, shrunk in on himself. John yells, of course, yells that Dean had one job - look after his little brother, make sure Sam was safe. How could he fuck it up? How could he fail his family like this? 

And Dean, the now-Dean, watching this happen is struck anew by how double-edged his father’s words are. Dean, unconsciously mirroring his younger self’s body language, shoulders hunched, knowing what’s coming, sucks in a deep breath. Because it’s not sixteen-year-old Dean John is yelling at. Not really. 

John comes down from the rage and fear, and instead of burning hot the way he does when he’s drunk, he becomes like ice. 

It’s evening, the air still hot and heavy in the cramped motel room, the light outside darkening by the minute. 

“We’ll start searching tomorrow on a grid, go over everything again, anywhere you missed,” he says tonelessly. 

Dean’s looking at the floor, refusing to cry, hating himself. He nods. “Yes, sir.” 

“Take off your shirt.” John’s voice is dispassionate still, devoid of any emotion. When Dean looks up, startled, his father’s face is the same blank facade. His eyes, though, are full of hate. “You heard me boy.” John undoes his belt, popping the buckle open and sliding the thick leather from his jeans. 

Dean swallows. His dad hasn’t done this in… god, it’s been years. The last time must have been when he was ten, when… when that monster had almost killed Sammy. 

Dean takes off his flannel and hangs it over the bedpost. He strips off his t-shirt too, folding it automatically. He doesn’t let himself shake. He’s not a fucking baby. He deserves this. He’s earned it. 

It’s quick and brutal. Dean stands with his hands braced against the smudgy gray motel room wall and John brings the belt down on the bare skin of his back. 

Sixteen-year-old Dean stares at the gray of the wall and sinks into the pain, keeping his damn mouth shut as he feels the burn of the strap, the bite of the metal buckle raising welts across his skin. He deserves this. This is his fault. 

It all goes to hell after that. 

Now-Dean remembers. Of course he remembers. He watches it, detached, seeing the scene as a spectator for the first time, conscious of Cas next to him. He remembers being dizzy with the pain, with not having eaten or slept in days, with how sick-to-his-stomach he is with fear about Sam, with the guilt that this is his fault, it’s his fault if Sam is dead or hurt. 

He remembers exactly how it felt when John drops the belt, panting, turning Dean around roughly. There are tears in his eyes as he shakes him. Then he’s throwing Dean to the ground with a thud, the newly formed sores on Dean’s back rippling with pain at the contact, and John is on top of him, and they’re fighting, somehow, even though Dean never fights back, even though it’s futile. Dean remembers being off-balance, nauseated, not thinking straight and his body taking over for once, fighting his dad off like he would with any other attack. But he’s seeing double, and then John is pinning him down and his large hand is wrapped around Dean’s throat, cutting off his air. 

Dean chokes, squirms, tries to gasp. 

The dizziness magnifies, and Dean’s lightheaded, his vision is going black. 

Dean thinks in that moment that John is actually going to kill him, and Dean remembers distinctly, painfully, how relief had washed over him. He’d felt such a surge of lightheaded gratefulness to his dad that, yes, this was what he deserved. If Sam was dead, Dean didn’t have any reason to go on living. If Sam was dead, then maybe if Dean died, he’d be with him. 

Living Dean, the now-Dean, chokes. He’s himself, but he can feel it like it’s happening, like he’s sixteen and hating himself, just wanting to be with his brother, happy that he won’t have to fight anymore. 

Cas’ hand hesitantly brushes his shoulder. It’s the thinnest tether, but Dean grabs on to it, tries to keep himself out of sixteen-year-old Dean’s head as he lays there pliant, breathless, choking beneath John’s tightening hand. 

John lets go. It’s sudden and Dean stays on his back, sputtering, reaching up to rub his own throat. John gets up and backs away from Dean. Now-Dean can see what he couldn’t then, that John’s hands are shaking and his eyes are wide with horror. That it’s his own horror at what he’s done, what he’s capable of. It’s his self-hatred screaming in that room too. 

The rest of it plays out. John books another room, because even though there are two beds in this one and money is always a problem, he clearly can’t even look at Dean. 

And Dean… he leaves the lights off as evening turns into night, letting the room go dark around him. He lays on top of the covers of the bed on his stomach, face in the pillow that still smells like Sam while silent tears leak down his face. 

The memory twists and turns and drops Dean to his knees on the cold, slightly damp floor of the room with the doors. 

Dean is shaking a little and he stays on his knees, even though Cas has managed to remain on his feet and he’s standing there with his hand on Dean’s shoulder. 

Dean lets himself cover his face with his hands for just a moment, just looking into the dark of his own eyelids and trying to forget the feeling of fucking serenity that his sixteen-year-old self had on that motel room floor. 

It’s not… 

Dean doesn’t _want_ to die. He’s done it plenty already. Yeah, he’s tired. And yeah, there have been times when he’s been tired enough that he’s wanted a fasttrack out. He’s not going to deny it. 

But _sixteen._ Jesus christ. 

Dean has always said he was never a child, and it’s true. Hunters aren’t. He couldn’t be a kid, not with everything on his shoulders. He’s not going to deny the adult shit that sixteen-year-old Dean was dealing with either. But looking at himself like that, seeing himself for the first time, really… 

“You know,” Cas says, when Dean gives no indication of getting up or speaking. “I saw you once. Before hell, I mean. I wasn’t supposed to, we were all under strict orders not interfere with the Winchesters unless specifically instructed to do so. But I was on earth. Reconnaissance, unrelated. And I knew you were in the area. We all knew, of course, that you were something special. Someone important. “Big plans for those boys,” Anna used to say. 

“I had faith in the plan then, faith that I would know what I needed to when I needed to. But this wasn’t about need. I wanted to know more than I’d been told. I located where the famous Dean Winchester was supposed to be while I was in the area, and I turned up. 

“You must have been sixteen, seventeen. You were in a deserted parking lot in Nebraska, teaching Sam how to drive. I remember looking at you through the Impala window, thinking you were so young. The both of you. You were so… human. Sam kept pulling into the parking spaces outside the lines, but you were being patient, talking him through driving in reverse, how to account for the car’s engine. You were teasing each other, laughing so easily together. I didn’t stay long, but I remember thinking that the way you loved each other was so apparent. It was something I didn’t really understand then. Even so, I wanted to protect it, protect you. That was when I began praying for you.” 

Dean takes his face out of hands and peers up at Cas. “You never told me that.” 

“No. I didn’t think you’d like the idea of me watching you.” 

Dean grunts. He pushes himself to his feet, shaking off Cas’ hand. The Dean that Cas had pulled out of Hell wouldn’t have liked the idea, no, but that Dean didn’t really know Castiel yet. 

“Well, thanks for your thoughts and prayers, I guess.” Dean doesn’t mean it to come out sounding sarcastic, but he’s not at his best. 

Cas doesn’t wince or look offended. “I do wish that I could have done more, Dean. I -” 

Dean raises a hand. “Don’t.” 

Cas bites off whatever he was going to say and sighs instead. 

Door number two is still whole, still has its number clearly visible above the door frame. 

“Well,” Cas mutters. “One of us has to.” 

“Shut up, okay? I’m fine. Let me just…” Dean runs his hands through his hair. The silence hangs heavy around them and Dean wishes he was alone here. He thinks that, actually, Sam would have been worse than Cas, because Sam would have been pissed. Sam wouldn’t have understood why Dean wasn’t angrier, why he couldn’t just be mad at John for what he’d done. 

Sam would have been guilty too, would have blamed himself for Dean putting his neck out to protect him, Dean taking the brunt of John’s anger for Sam running away. 

“I don’t hate him,” Dean says finally, quietly, staring at the door, willing it to catch fire the way that door number one had. 

“Your father?” 

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, sometimes I have. I’m not a fucking idiot, okay? I understand you don’t hit your kids like that. I get it. But dad was just…” Dean swallows around the words “doing his best”. “He was doing what he thought he had to for us to survive. All of us. And we did. And yeah, yeah, sometimes it wasn’t… But I forgave him, you know? I mean, when it happened, every time, I always forgave him.” 

There’s a lump in Dean’s throat. 

“So what’s the point, you know? I forgave him at four, at fourteen, at sixteen. I can see that it’s… I get that it wasn’t great. I get that looking at it, you’d think I was a kid getting - getting abused, or whatever. But that was never how I saw myself. I saw it as heavy-handed discipline, and he was right to discipline me, most of the time, even if the way he did it was…” Dean trails off. The door is just a door. 

“Dean, can I say something?” 

Sam would definitely not have asked. 

Dean grunts, which Cas takes as an affirmation. 

“I do not think you are an idiot, first of all,” Cas says. He’s always standing too close to Dean, never quite grasping the concept of personal space. At this point, Dean just kind of allows it. 

“Nor would anyone who knows you. I… I think that you care more intensely than anyone I have ever known. And that doesn’t make you stupid, it doesn’t make you weak. It’s something bea-” Cas stops suddenly, and Dean looks at him sharply, because for a second it sounded like Cas was going to say “beautiful.” 

“It’s something brave,” Cas goes on hastily. “To love like that. And to love even after all you’ve been through. 

“Cas, come on.” 

“All I want to ask you is how you would feel about what you’ve just seen if these events were something that had happened to Sam instead of you?” 

Dean’s first impulse is to tell Cas to fuck off. That he doesn’t need Cas to be his fucking therapist. 

But… God. He thinks about the way he felt looking at baby Sammy. He’d never say it out loud, not to Cas or Sam or anyone, but it’s the most intense love he’s ever felt in his life. That desire to protect Sammy, it’s built into his very bones. He still feels it when he looks at his brother now, that engrained worry that he’s not eating enough, not sleeping enough. That Dean’s not doing enough to take care of him. 

He can’t help it. 

That’s who Dean is. 

“I…” Dean starts. He doesn’t have anywhere he’s going with that. 

Because the truth? 

The truth is that if it had come down to choosing between his dad and Sammy, Dean would have killed John to protect his brother. 

That was why Dean didn’t fight back, wasn’t it? Why he always stepped between them. Why the night that Sam left for Stanford, the night that Sam ripped the beating heart out of Dean’s chest, he’d ducked between them as they screamed at each other. Dean had thought of himself as an adult, or at least as a hunter, but Sam had been just a kid. He’d tried to let Sam be a kid. Tried to take it all on, so Sam wouldn’t see, so Sam wouldn’t hurt. 

So Sam wouldn’t hurt the way that Dean had. 

Because… fuck. 

Dean had forgiven John because it was easier, because it hurt less, because Dean had to hold on to the idea that someone loved him. It was easier, if being hurt was his fault. He’d internalized all of it, vacuum-sealed all that pain and fear and betrayal into his core. There’s no fucking way he’s unzipping all of that after ten minutes of angelic headshrink bullshit, but… 

It’s true. It’s different outside, looking in. 

Dean would have literally shot John if he’d laid a hand on Sammy like that. He can see traces of himself in Sam, traces of Sam in himself. Maybe Dean had been a child. And if he hadn’t, maybe he’d deserved the chance. 

The door bursts into flames, and when Dean blinks the spots out of his eyes, the number two has been replaced with the same charred X. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific Content Warnings: Child abuse, child neglect, physical and emotional abuse, self-hatred, suicidal ideation, sexual harassment, implied sexual abuse


	2. Fool in the Rain (Door Three)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Content Warnings in end notes**

Dean and Cas stare at the soot-blackened door for a moment. 

"Huh," Dean says, rubbing the back of his neck. "This is some real fucked up bullshit spell your buddies worked up, you know that?" 

Cas shrugs, his trenchcoat rustling like wings. "It's not mine." 

"How much time do you think we got left?" 

Cas looks at the five remaining doors. "I don't know. My guess is that this place, this room we're in now, is the crux of the internal mechanism of the angelic ward. Which would mean, I think, that these doors act as portals into external memories. That is, internal to you, but external to the ward. Which implies that time passes in this room, but not in your memories." 

"So, what? The longer we stay here between doors, the more likely we are to stay comatose?" 

"I'm afraid so." 

Dean rakes his hands through his hair one more time, then throws them up, exasperated. "Really? What a bunch of dicks." 

Cas doesn't mention that Dean apparently wasted 5 hours of his time-stamped coma being too chickenshit to go through the second door on his own. 

Dean takes a shaky breath. He's kind of… he's certainly not going to admit it, not to Cas and not to himself in so many words, but he's kind of glad in that moment that Cas is there. Dean is a little afraid that, time limit or no time limit, he might not pick himself up like this five more times if it was just his life on the line. 

"Well, buddy, you ready to learn some more uncomfortable truths then?" Dean claps his hands together. He can hear how hollow his bravado sounds, but Cas doesn't call him on it. 

Dean rolls his eyes at Cas' utterly stoic, sad expression, and yanks open the third door, his palms sweaty. 

They're in a house with boarded up windows. An industrial flashlight and a couple of candles provide the only lighting in the kitchen and living room. 

A twenty-two-year-old Dean is eating cold baked beans out of a can while he tinkers with an EMF reader. He's got a couple of extra parts on the floor next to him from a busted-up walkman and an old Teddy Ruxspin he found at a garage sale. 

Sam, eighteen and gangly, is sitting on the old stained couch with a book in his lap - Bleak House by Charles Dickens - but his eyes aren't moving across the page. 

John is sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through pages in his journal and a newspaper, looking for cases. 

"Fuck," now-Dean mutters. "Really? More of this?" 

"What?" Cas asks, but Dean just shakes his head. 

Abruptly, Sam stands up from the couch and puts his book into the duffel bag sitting next to him. He clears his throat. 

"Dean," he says, his voice slightly higher than usual. Dean looks up with his fork in his mouth, both hands occupied twisting together some wires. 

"Yeah?" Dean says around the cutlery. 

Sam looks over to the kitchen. "Dad?" He calls. 

John glances up, tired, irritated. "What is it, Sam?" 

"I have something I need to tell you both," Sam says. He twists his hands together before tucking them behind his back. 

Dean drops the wires and takes the fork out of his mouth, looking up at Sam with his eyes wide and slightly panicky. When Sam catches his eye, Dean tries to jerk his head in a subtle shake, to tell him _no, not now._

Sam doesn't take the hint, or he ignores it. 

"Look, I know that… this is going to be something you don't want to hear." Sam glances between both of them, but he's talking mostly to John. Dean already has a pretty good idea of what's coming. He knows that Sam took the SATs last summer without telling their dad. Hell, Dean was the one who paid for them, so, yeah, he knows. 

"But just, please, remember that what I'm about to say is a good thing, okay? It's something that's making me really happy. Like, this is something that, for the first time, makes me feel like I can see a real future for myself." Sam takes a deep breath. 

Now-Dean can't help but think how much the first part of his speech sounded like he was trying to come out to them, which, isn't that laden with irony? 

"I got in to Stanford," Sam says, both eager and nervous. 

Memory-Dean gets up from the floor, an unconvincing smile pasted on his face. "Sammy, you little nerd, congratulations. That's great, man." 

Sam smiles at his brother, grateful and still full of nerves, bouncing a little on his feet. "Thanks. It's not just that, though. They've offered me a full-ride, full-tuition and board and everything for all four years." 

Dean slaps his brother on the back. "Wow, kiddo, look at you." 

Dean knew Sam was applying, knew his wiz-kid of a brother would probably get in somewhere, but Dean didn't think Sam would actually go. Partly, because he'd never be able to afford it, even if Dean helped, but partly because Dean really thought this was more of a pride thing for Sam. Sam was just proving that he _could_ do it, proving to himself and everyone else how smart he really was. 

Twenty-two-year-old Dean can't imagine leaving the life, and he'd never even try to imagine leaving Sam. Was it really so unreasonable that he'd expected the same from his brother? 

Sam flashes that half-nervous grin at Dean, and it's clear that he's trying to reign in his real excitement. It makes Dean's stomach lurch. Sam turns to John who is sitting silent and still at the kitchen table. 

"Dad? Say something." 

John gets up slowly. Now-Dean glances at his memory self, sees the look of fear there as he runs calculations of risk. 

"What do you want me to say?" John asks when he's in the living room doorway. His hands are shoved in his well-worn leather jacket and his expression is steely. 

Sam is hurt. It comes out as anger, but Dean, both then and now, knows what it really is. 

"I don't know, maybe "Well done, son"? "Congratulations"?" 

John and Sam stare each other down for a moment, the tension slowly rising. Dean hovers, braced. 

John looks away first. "Fine, well done," he says gruffly. "You've proven yourself smart enough for college, great. What now?" 

"Well," Sam says slowly, his brow creased. "The semester starts on September 9th, so I've got to be in California by the end of August." 

Twenty-two-year-old Dean takes a shaky breath that no one notices. Now-Dean remembers every second of this. He remembers himself thinking: Okay. Okay, so, if Sammy really wants to go to college, he can make this work. There's plenty to hunt on the West Coast. Dean can stick around the area and still give Sam a little space to breathe, to be his own person at college. They can do hunts together in the summers and winters, and maybe the weekends when Sammy's got time and there's something not too far from campus. It won't be the same, but if it makes Sam happy, Dean can make it work. 

"No," John says flatly. Both boys look at him. Now-Dean winces. He can't help it. That dead look in John's eyes is such a giveaway. 

"No what?" Sam says, his chest puffed up a little, his jaw set. 

" _No_ , you're not going to California in August. What's your plan here, Sam? You're going to leave your family? You're just going to go off to some Ivy League and pretend like you don't know what goes bump in the night? There's no walking away from this life, there's no pretending not to see. Your job is here with us, protecting people. You think you can just give that up for what, a degree? Doing keg stands at frat parties? Some white-picket fence American dream? None of that is real, Sam. None of that means anything." 

Sam keeps himself straight backed, his pain and disappointment masked in his own anger and pride, so like their dad's, really. 

"There's more than one way to help people," Sam says. It's a tempered softness in his voice, a warning that his own patience won't last. 

John snorts. "Sure. For other people. But they don't know what we do. We have a responsibility-" 

"Dad, no." Sam interrupts John, and he might as well have stood up swearing in church. "I'm sorry, but no. You can't just choose my life for me. I get to decide what has meaning, too, and I know that there's more than this." Sam gestures around the dilapidated house they're squatting in. He doesn't need to elaborate. 

John looks apoplectic. 

"You telling me you won't follow an order, boy?" John asks. It's his most dangerous voice. Dean shifts on his feet. He hates this, hates Sam and dad fighting. They've had some pretty spectacular blow-outs over the last couple of years, and every time, Dean has been terrified what it will come down to, how it will end. He's been dreading the day he's not there to get between them, if he's not around to diffuse the situation, to talk Sam down or let John take it out on him. But this time… Dean doesn't know how to conflict-counsel his way out of this one. 

"I'm telling you that you can't ask me not to do this," Sam says. "I'm your son, not your soldier." 

John looks at Sam for a minute and then, worse than yelling, he says in his icy voice "Then I don't have any use for you here. You might as well leave now." 

"Dad," Dean says, trying to keep his voice rationale instead of pleading, desperate. 

Sam laughs, an empty, hollow, bitter sound. "Right," he says, ignoring Dean. "And what _is_ my use again? Hunting down random monsters all over the states so that you can pretend you're avenging mom's death? How's that going, by the way?" 

"Sam, don't." Dean knows it's begging this time, and he doesn't care. _Shut up, Sammy_ , he thinks. _Just keep your mouth shut._

"No," Sam snaps. "I want to know. All our lives, it's been giving everything in pursuit of some martyred revenge fantasy. When's the last time you had an actual lead on mom's death, dad? How long are you going to keep pretending that you're not just swinging blind in the dark on this, hoping to hit something by chance?" 

" _Sam."_

"And you'll be getting revenge at college, will you, smart ass?" John's knuckles are clenched white at his sides. 

"At least I'll be living," Sam yells. "At least I won't be stuck eighteen years in the past for the rest of my goddamn life." 

John steps forward. "You have no idea what you're talking about. You're just a fucking kid, you have no idea what it's like to lose someone. Just because I've protected you from certain things doesn't mean I don't have leads. You know what you need to know." 

"Protected me? _Protected_ me?! When have you ever protected me and Dean from anything?" 

"Sammy, please," Dean tries again. He might as well be invisible to the murderous passion between them. 

John punches the wall, and twenty-two-year-old Dean jumps. Now-Dean winces at how painfully obvious his past self is, how like a dog just waiting to be kicked. 

"You watch your damn mouth, boy," John snarls, his voice raised now too. "I mean it." 

"Or what?" Sam takes a step forward, chest out, arms spread. "Come on, do it, take a shot." 

Dean steps between them, puts his hand on Sam's shoulder and presses him gently back. 

"Sam," he says quietly. "Okay, take a breath, big guy." 

"After everything, if you're so eager to walk out on your family, then leave." John's voice rises, breaks off without breaking. "But I'm warning you, you walk out that door, you better not come back." 

Sam, angry, defiant, the sheer raw energy of being eighteen angled in the tensed lines of his body, still looks like he's been slapped. 

"Dad, please," Dean says quietly, turning back with one hand still braced against Sammy's chest. Dean would give anything to make this stop. 

"Stay out of this, Dean," John says. 

Sam's chest is heaving with barely suppressed rage. He looks down at Dean - which twenty-two-year-old Dean still isn't used to, still thinks of his little brother as this kid he has to look out for, not this behemoth of a young man - and there are practically sparks flying in his eyes. 

"What about you, Dean? Are you just going to let him drag you everywhere the rest of your life? Just going to let him -" 

"Sammy, Jesus, man, shut up." 

It's the closest all night that Sam's expression has come to remorse, but he shakes his head. "I can't do it. Not anymore. Come with me or don't, but I'm going to California." 

Now-Dean is uncomfortably aware of how transparent his younger self's face is. He always thought he held it in better than that, but past Dean's heart is breaking in the silence as loudly as a guitar string snapping.

"Sammy… don't. Don't do this. Not like this." 

Sam turns around and picks up his duffel off the couch, swings it over his shoulder. 

"So that's how it's gonna be?" John snaps. "You're just going to walk out like it's nothing." 

Sam is still breathing hard. He looks at Dean again. "Are you coming?" 

Dean stares at his younger brother, wondering how his little Sammy had grown to be this person who was so smart, so much stronger than Dean was. 

Dean looks between his father and brother, barely concealed anguish in his still too-pretty face. 

Sam can't leave him. 

Not like this. 

Twenty-two-year-old Dean looks between Sam's youthful defiance and John's steady, impenetrable pride. He's tried to imagine before what it might be like if he followed Sam to wherever he went for college, how they could get an off-campus apartment and Dean would make himself useful helping out with the bills. But that's just it - Sam would be out there, pursuing some larger dream, and Dean hasn't got any of those. He has no ambitions outside of hunting, no real skill set. Sure, he's worked in Bobby's scrapyard enough that he could probably get himself apprenticed at a mechanic's garage. Might not even have to turn his old tricks if he could prove himself fixing cars. That's not a bad life, and sometimes Dean does daydream about what it might be like to hold a normal job and just exist, but the thought of Sam introducing him to his college friends like that, as his good-for-nothing older brother… 

More than that, though, is the look John's hiding beneath his simmering rage. Dean knows his dad. He knows that John is bracing for a loss, and Dean can't… he just can't let his dad down. 

Twenty-two-year-old Dean doesn't see any good options laid out before him at this particular crossroads, and so he makes the only choice he feels he can. 

He takes the path where at least someone still needs him. At least he'll be useful. 

"I'm not bailing on dad, Sam." 

The implication is there, the accusation that Sam is ditching them, that at least in this, Dean is aligned with his father in family fidelity. 

Sam's expression hardens. He breathes out, loud and fast. "Fine," he says, and turns away from them both, turns to the hallway leading to the front door. Just like that. 

"Sam." It's John's voice that calls out to stop him before he reaches the door. Sam turns back with half a hope in his eyes. Now-Dean sees it, even if past-Dean couldn't. Sam wanted to leave, but he still wanted to be asked to stay. 

"Leave your gun. You won't need it where you're going, and at least Dean and I won't be down a firearm." 

Sam's mouth tightens back up, but he nods. He pulls the handgun and a box of ammo out of his bag and shoves them into Dean's hands. 

Sam gives Dean a look, holding his brother's tortured gaze for a long moment. It's a look that says _if it comes down to it, you shoot him first._

And that's it. 

That's all there is. 

Sam takes his jacket off the hook by the door, pulls the strap of his duffel bag back over it, and walks out. 

Dean rushes after him, gun still loose in hand, and catches the door before it closes. Sam looks back at the foot of the steps and pauses, but they don't say anything, just look at each other in the full dark of evening. 

Then Sam turns and walks away down the open road. 

Dean watches him go, everything in him fighting the instinct to run after him, to yell at Sam that he can't leave, _you can't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me with him._

Eventually, Sam's shadow disappears into the fuzzy darkness of the road, and eventually, Dean turns and goes back inside, closing the door, feeling absolutely wild, feeling like he's just lost the only good part of himself. 

What is he supposed to do with himself now? 

The memory shifts and jerks, and it catches now-Dean off-guard. He thought for sure they would get to the part where John drained two beers and a glass of undiluted whiskey and asked Dean if he'd known about all of it. He thought they'd watch the part where John's rage was ice again, when all he did was slap Dean once across the face before heading up the creaking stairs, where all his passion had been used up on Sam. Where Dean had stayed up all night, stripping wires until his fingers bled, kept company only by the bottle of whiskey. 

But the mindfuck of this spell or curse or ward, or whatever, yanks now-Dean and Cas out of the memory and deposits them along the wooden fence outside a broad pasture at dusk. 

"What the hell?" Dean mutters. "What was the point of that?" 

And then - no space to breathe, no time to come down from the fear and adrenaline leftover from what, after everything, was still one of the worst nights of his life - Dean sees her. 

Cassie is wearing a white button-down shirt tucked into her blue jeans and she's got on brown cowboy boots that ride halfway up to her knees. Her curly natural hair is loose around her shoulders and she's grinning where she leans forward against the fence, the golden light of sunset shining in her eyes. 

Now-Dean swallows, hit with the nostalgia of it, with how beautiful she is. God. He hasn't thought about Cassie in a long-time. Years, probably. He doesn't let himself think about any of this stuff. Maybe that's what this ward is trying to tell him. 

"Really?" Dean says again, looking up at the sky. "Abandonment issues? That's what you got for me?" 

"I don't think anyone is actually listening, Dean," Cas says mildly. "I'm fairly certain this ward is self-maintaining." 

And huh. Cassie. Cas. Dean never thought of it before, but his first love and his best friend… It's kind of funny. 

Or it might be, if Dean wasn't in the middle of this non-consensual exposure therapy nightmare. 

He and Cas watch the lover's quarrel as it plays out, the smell of the farm ripe but not unpleasant around them in the evening air. 

The memory-Dean is… what? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Dean can't really remember, which is something of a surprise. Whatever age he is, he's an idiot, the way he fumbles through excuses for why he has to leave town, again, why he's always bailing, why he sometimes comes back through all scratched up. 

Cassie calls him on every last piece of crap, and really, it's one of the things Dean had liked so much about her. 

So young Dean, foolish and desperate, always so desperate, tells her the truth, says "I know you're not going to believe me, but monsters are real." 

The lies weren't enough, but the truth isn't enough either. 

Young Dean stands still, doesn't move as Cassie shakes her head the last time and pushes past him, leaves him. He watches her walk away, the only thing he had to offer of himself, his truth, thrown back in his face. 

At least it's quick. 

The memory blurs and twists, and twenty-six-year-old Dean is saying "I could come with you," as John packs up a bag. 

John says "I got this one, Dean. I'll be back in a few days." 

Now-Dean knows that he won't. That this is the hunt where dad finally leaves him and doesn't come home. He's been leaving Dean on his own more and more over the last few years, since Sam left, basically. At this point they're barely hunting together, just meeting up every few weeks so dad can give him orders. 

Now-Dean remembers the panic when dad didn't meet up when he said he would, when he wasn't where he said he'd be. 

_Everybody leaves you, Dean. You notice that?_

Twenty-six-year-old Dean had tried. He'd visited every step he thought his dad might have taken, called all the usual contacts, called all the morgues and hospitals in the three nearest states. He'd checked police scanners and bookings, called the national park rangers in the areas. He'd done everything he could think of. And then, in a panic, in the middle of the night, he'd gotten in his car and driven to California. 

The memory shimmers and slips and it's Sam leaving him, that night in October, before the scarecrow pagan god thing. 

Then it's Sam leaving him when he was possessed. 

It's Sam leaving him for Ruby, Dean echoing their father's words to him and Sam walking out that door anyway. 

It's Sam saying yes to Lucifer. 

It's Sam, soulless, not really there, not really caring. 

And then it's Cas, working with Crowley, going to a demon instead of them, someone who is supposed to be family choosing a damn _demon_ over Dean, again. 

The now-Dean being hit by these memories, bombarded with them one after another, feels Cas shift uncomfortably beside him, but Dean keeps his eyes on the burning god-Castiel of his memory and they don't speak. 

It's Cas leaving him behind in Purgatory, Dean left on his own to fight against endless monsters, not knowing why Cas has disappeared, if he's just left him there or if he's dead. Now-Dean can see how desperate everything about Purgatory-Dean is, how positively feral he becomes looking for Cas. It's… 

And then it's Cas abandoning him at the portal, refusing to be saved, choosing Purgatory over Dean. 

It's finding out Sam never looked for him while he was in Purgatory. 

It's… 

The memory grinds and shifts and spits them back out into the room with the doors. 

Dean manages to stay on his feet this time, although it's a near thing. 

"Dean," Cas says, but Dean holds up a hand and he falls silent. 

Dean pinches the bridge of his nose, tilting his head back and gazing up at that high, dark ceiling. 

The series of images - the memories, the feelings… They're all sort of blurring together, hitting too fast, bottling up inside his chest and throat. 

The thing is, Dean has tried so _damn hard._ His whole life, he's tried so hard to be whatever anyone needed him to be: a good son, an obedient soldier, a protective brother, a patient father, a caring mother, a reliable partner, a devoted friend, a skilled hunter. He's played every part of those roles, tried to put every piece of himself into them, and he never seems to get it right. 

He's never enough. For anyone. Never enough for his dad, for Sammy, for Cas. They all leave him eventually. 

Seeing it all stitched together like that, it's not fair. Dean didn't ask for this. He didn't ask to see the worst patterns of his life stripped bare and laid out before him. Maybe he's just a fool to think anyone could ever stay.

_And if you promised you'd love so completely/And you said you would always be true…_

Dean takes a deep breath. Another. He tries to loosen the knot in his chest. 

There's one thing keeping him upright, one thing that he thinks maybe this sadistic fucking spell didn't account for, something that it left out of the memories on purpose: 

Sammy and Cas, they always came back. 

Sam, overcoming Lucifer to save Dean, Cas overcoming the full wrath of Heaven to save him. 

They came back to him, for him.

The third door bursts into flames. Dean turns to look at Cas, who is blinking the afterglow out of his eyes with a look of surprise. 

Dean points double finger-guns at him. "Looks like I don't need you to life-coach me through everything, Frasier. Told you I was coping." 

Cas frowns. "I don't understand that reference, but I'm glad to see your personal growth."

His voice is dry, and Dean is just glad Cas is still teasing him, albeit in his weird way. 

"Dean… please let me say that I'm sorry," Cas continues, quickly, clearly afraid Dean will cut him off. "Truly, for anything that I've done that-" 

And Dean, just to show how much personal growth he's made, hastily yanks the fourth door open to shut him up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Abuse, emotional abuse, (light) verbal abuse, abandonment


	3. The Visible Reminder of Invisible Light (Door Four)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Content Warnings in end notes

So. Number four is the death door. 

Dean has a vague recollection of the number four being associated with death in some cultures, but he can't remember where or why. Sam would know.

Cas probably knows, but Dean is finding it increasingly difficult to meet his eyes. 

Being battered with all this shit, having it parsed out into sections and handed to him one clump after another like a series of mental health pamphlets in a doctor's waiting room, it's stretching Dean's ability to stay remotely present. 

Dean feels wrung out. On edge. He feels like a fucking teenager again, brought back to that place where he was running on bluffs and adrenaline, one wrong turn away from tipping into the void. 

God, he needs a drink. 

There's this thing that happens to Dean sometimes, something that for a long time he didn't have the words for. He just assumed it was something wrong with him, just another crack in his skull somewhere. 

Sometimes, Dean just can't feel anything at all. 

It used to make him feel like a psychopath. He'd be sitting somewhere with Sammy, his brother teasing him and grinning, the two of them out there doing something fun for once, and Dean would make his mouth turn up, make the simulacrum of laughter come out at Sammy's jokes, but he'd be so far removed from the emotion of it that forcing his facial expressions felt like molding clay. Or they'd be on a hunt, and Dean would feel the physical rush of adrenaline, but it was like his brain couldn't interpret it. It didn't mean anything. He could be down on the ground with a werewolf clawing his wrists and there'd be nothing - no fear, no thrill, just a dull thud in his chest telling him what to do. 

It was like the part of Dean's brain or heart or whatever that processed his emotions just kind of went away, and Dean was left on autopilot. 

Dean kind of figured, hey, he's broken in a dozen other ways, whatever, so what if he goes numb sometimes? It's not the worst thing. After Hell, he would have given anything to be able to control it, to give up feeling anything for good if he could forget what that place had made him. 

The thing about not feeling, though, is that it leaves him hollow. There's no pain, but there's also no hope. It's this sense that he's not really part of the world - he's not crazy, or at least, like, he's not delusional. He understands what's real and that he's there and that he should be feeling something about it all. It's just that, when he can't feel anything, it's almost like he's outside his body. Or maybe very, very deep inside. Somewhere disconnected from the mainframe. 

What was it Famine had said to him? _That's one deep, dark nothing you got there… You're not hungry, Dean, because inside, you're already dead._

A couple years back, Dean stole Sam's laptop one evening and did some googling. He wasn't trying to WebMD himself, not to psychoanalyse himself anyway, he just wanted to make sure that he wasn't, like… 

It had been after Sam got his soul back, after the worst of his hallucinations. And Dean just… he was trying to reassure himself that his own soul was mostly functional. He'd wanted to ask Cas to check, but Cas had been broken then too. 

All of which turned out to say that Dean dissociates. He has no control over it, sometimes his emotions just check the fuck out. 

Dean can feel it happening now, as the memory of his mother's death plays out before him and Cas. Four-year-old Dean is there again, standing outside their burning house, clutching Sammy in his own small arms while his brother cries and twists. He tries his best to rock him, but he's heavy and Dean's arms are weak. 

John comes back from talking to the firemen, already a different man. He swoops up Dean and Sam in one move, pulling both boys into his arms and sitting down on the hood of the Impala. He crushes Dean to him, one hand on Dean's wrist, taking some of the weight of Sam. John's shaking. He holds his sons while he and Dean watch their house, their life, burn. 

It's the last time, for a long time, that anyone will hold Dean like that. 

Then it's the hospital, John splayed out on the floor, twenty-six-year-old Dean back from the grave, leaning on Sam and feeling the world cave in. 

Now-Dean watches it happen, detached. He remembers the absolute desolation of that grief, how it came in waves that threatened to kill him, the loss so intense that he wanted to rip his own skin off. He remembers the way it had all been subsumed by anger, transmuted into rage, taking it out on the cars in Bobby's junkyard. 

Watching John die this time, though, Dean's barely even there. 

Then it's Sam, falling to his knees, spine severed. The moment that broke Dean like no other. 

Dean's been to Hell, been a demon, lost everything that ever mattered to him more than once. But if there was one moment when his life changed, when Dean himself split into the Before and the After, it's this. 

Cas tries to put a hand on his shoulder and Dean shoves him roughly away. 

Then it's Cas, blown up the first time by Raphael. 

It's the explosion, the smell of kerosene, when Ellen and Jo died.

It's Sam, shotgun rounds to the chest in that hotel room, moments before Dean's own death, before Heaven. 

It's Cas, blown up again by Lucifer. 

It's Sam again, and Adam, falling together into the pit. Sam's face is peaceful. Dean's never seen what his own face looked like as his brother fell into Hell. Memory-Dean is so bloodied and bruised, so swollen that he's barely recognizable. 

It's Cas, taken over by the leviathan and wading into the water like some horror show John the Baptist. 

Then it's Bobby. And hell, what is there to say about losing the man who first showed Dean what a father could be? 

It's Cas again. And again. 

Dean hears his past self's voice break on Cas' name, reaching for his face where he's slumped in that chair, an undeniable hole in his chest from the angel blade. If Dean wasn't locked down somewhere unreachable in his body, he thinks blandly, he might be embarrassed by his own obvious desperation. 

And Dean watches the absolute last bit of light in his own eyes go out, watches himself fall to his knees at Cas' side where Lucifer has left him sprawled on the ground. He can't even look at his own memory's face - it's the face of someone in the act of giving up. Someone who is ready to let the world burn, someone who is ready to die. 

It's a confusing thing for now-Dean - the levels of his detachment from the memories playing out before him are manifold. He's outside the memory, looking in, but he's also outside himself, external to all versions of Dean. 

The only thing he knows for sure is that he can't save anybody. 

  
  


The memories blur, contort, twist, and drop Dean back into the room with the doors. He staggers and Cas catches him, steadying him by the arm. Dean pushes him away again quickly. It's too much. When he feels like this, being touched is… 

It's tantamount to violation. 

Dean's not in his body, he's not present, doesn't trust himself to say no. It makes his skin crawl, the thought of fingers on his moldable clay self. And then there's the part deep down in him, that desperate, headstrong, full-speed-ahead, reckless speck of self that thinks _better to feel something than nothing at all._

And boy, has that led Dean down some wrong corners in the past. 

Dean knows he needs to give this place something, work himself into some kind of revelation, but he's empty. He can't bring up anything that feels worth giving. 

So everyone leaves him. So everyone dies. So his dad used to beat the crap out of him. Dean knows all of this. It's useless to what he does, maybe worse than useless, maybe a liability. Maybe they've got it all wrong and the spell doesn't want some touchy-feely exploration of his feelings, maybe what it wants is for Dean to exorcise them once and for all, cut them off like vestigial limbs and throw them on the fire. 

It would be in line with what Heaven usually asks of them, anyway. 

Time is ticking by, and Dean feels both absolutely nothing and a sort of deadened panic. It's like water flowing under ice. It's there inside him, making all the usual fuss in his nervous system, but his body isn't talking to his higher conscious. 

Dean can tell that Cas is trying to give him as much time as possible, but eventually he clears his throat. 

"Dean, I think you should look at me."

Dean hadn't put much thought into where his eyes were drifting, but it's hard, now that Cas has asked for it, to turn to him. 

It's an effort to meet his eyes. 

All he can see is that last time, the ash of Cas' wings spread out from his body, Dean on his knees as if to pray, coming up empty. 

The Castiel here with him, in Dean's head, holds his gaze. They stare at each other in silence. 

That's normal, right? Dean wouldn't know, really. Cas is the first friend he's ever really had. He moved around too much when he was younger, and besides, he'd never really been like other boys. He'd known too much. And then when he was a little older, teenage boys had been competition. Dean isn't proud of it, but he'd never even considered making friends with girls. He feels gross about it now, the way that even into his twenties he saw girls, women, as bodies, not people. Dean feels guilty about it not least because he knows what it's like to be objectified, sexualized. 

Sure, Dean's been _friendly_ with a lot of people. He's charming, pretty, charismatic, can drink almost anyone under the table. He'd pick up one-night friends the way he used to pick up one-night stands, budding up with other hunters, with college kids out at bars who would take him back to the dorms and share their drugs with him, with bar owners who it was always useful to know. 

But Dean had never really formed stable friendships with these people, partly because he was usually gone the next day, partly because in order to have a real friend you had to be willing to trust, and Dean hadn't been. Not for a long time. 

Okay, maybe it's not normal. Maybe for Dean, it's always all or nothing. You're either family or you're not. Cas, Charlie, Garth, they are, or were, family. They're his people. Maybe other people can have "just friends", but Dean doesn't really see the point. He needs people he would die for, not people to go to brunch with. 

Cas' eyes are blue like the summer sky stretched out over Wyoming. They're blue like the reflection on water. It's a blue that isn't really _like_ anything, because it's a color that reminds Dean that the Greeks didn't have a word for blue. That blue both exists and does not exist in the way that humans create all constructs. 

Cas is, outside his vessel, a being of light, and blue is just light refracted in a way so rare in nature that a whole civilization never put a word to it. Cas' eyes are light, _the visible reminder of invisible light._

That's probably normal, to think about your best friend. Dean tries to pretend it's normal. 

He stares at Cas, and Cas stares back into him, and it shouldn't mean anything, shouldn't do anything, but it fucking works because after several solid minutes of this, Dean's breath hitches and he loses the contest, has to put his hands over his face. 

"I know what it's like," Cas starts hesitantly. "To lose you." 

"Cas…" 

"But I'm _here,_ Dean. I'm here, and so is Sam, and we're not much, but we're Team Free Will, right? I know I'm an invasion on your privacy right now, and you don't need me to tell you how much you've lost or how you feel about it, but Dean, the fact that you even get up in the morning after everything you've been through is admirable. 

"You told me once that I needed to let go of everyone I couldn't save because it was the opposite of what you do. Which, frankly, was terrible advice." 

Cas gives him the smallest smile, just a twitch in the corner of his mouth, but it… helps. 

"Do you know what I learned from you instead? It's not the letting go that works. It's the caring, the loving. It's like… there's a word in Enochian, I don't know how to say it in English. It's like… time-travel. The way that, to go back in time and have an effect on the future, that choice ripples in three points of time. It exists in the action of the past, the decision of the present, and the impact of the future. But it exists outside of time, too. That change that you make changes the present which changes your decisions which could change how you interact with the past to influence the future. Which is how you get paradoxes, see?" 

"Cas, I don't-" 

"Love exists out of time," Cas insists, interrupting him. "I'm… what I'm trying to say is that I go on caring because the loss and the guilt are my present, but my love is past, present, future tense. It hurts because it is supposed to hurt. But I keep fighting because there is a future where that fighting, that caring makes a difference. There's a past where it already has. It's… transcendence, I think. Does that make sense?" 

"Jesus, Cas, I don't know." Dean can't really wrap his head around what Cas is getting at. "Are you trying to say it doesn't matter that all our friends are dead as long as we go on loving them? Because I'm not buying that hippie shit."

"No," Cas tugs at his hair, frustrated. "Of course not. Of course it matters. I'm… I'm not even saying it makes it better. I just mean that it's the fact that it matters that matters most. I go on caring instead of letting go, because that's how I know I'm still hum-" Cas stops himself, a sad smile on his mouth. "Well, close to human, anyway." 

And to Dean, who still isn't feeling anything, this actually makes sense. Sometimes there is an automated survival in the numbness, and sometimes Dean would rather sink into it than feel anything, but… 

Emotions aren't vestigial, are they? They're evolutionary, like everything else. 

It's who Dean is, to care, even when it's too much, even when it makes him want to die. He's had too much loss, seen too much death, but dammit. He'll carry that until it kills him. He'll care until it kills him. 

The fourth door bursts into flames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Death, grief, dissociation, mention of suicidal ideation


	4. Liberty is the Soul's Right to Breathe (Door Five)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings: Upfront content warning that this chapter deals with: childhood sexual abuse, underage sex work, and sexual assault. More warnings in the end notes, but feel free to skip this chapter if you'd like, you will be able to extrapolate for the rest of the work.**

"Well," Dean says shakily. "This is fun." 

"I'm sorry, Dean." 

Dean waves a hand abstractly in the air. "Whatever." He rubs his face. "You ever tell anyone about any of this, I will Nair your head. I mean it, picture yourself smooth as a baby's bottom." 

Cas' mouth twitches in the ghost of a smile. "An unnecessary but vivid threat." 

"What can I say? I'm a creative little nuisance." Dean stretches his arms, cracks his shoulders. Even in his own head, his idea of his body is tense. 

"Shall we?" 

Cas nods, and Dean opens the fifth door. 

They fall into a dark room. It's night and the shades are drawn. Dean has no idea what this is, and there isn't much to go on. As his eyes adjust, he can make out what must be the shape of his younger self in a bed on one side of the room. There's a bed across from him, and that smaller lump under the covers must be Sammy. 

This could be anything. The only other sensory trigger is the smell, which Dean doesn't notice at first because it is more absence than presence. There is a conspicuous lack of stale smoke, mildew, or industrial-strength cleaning agents. They must be in a house - a real house that somebody lives in and keeps up with. It smells like freshly vacuumed carpet and clean sheets. 

Dean is still sorting through the possibilities when there is a creaking in the hallway outside the door and he freezes. 

He forgot about this. 

Well, no, he didn't, not really, but he never thinks about it. Never. Hasn't in over a decade. It isn't even conscious suppression anymore. It was so long ago and so much has happened since. 

How could he forget about this? 

The creaking from the hall gets closer. 

And Dean… can't. Actually can't, this time. 

"Nope," Dean says, and he strides forward and opens the bedroom door, not at all sure that it will work. 

It does. Dean and Cas are back in the room with the doors again, and Dean slams the fifth door shut. His heart is pounding so hard. He kinda can't breathe. 

They can't make him do this. 

Actually, no, he really can't breathe. There's something wrong with his chest. 

Dean is not going back in there. He's not bringing Cas back in there, Jesus. He knew one of these doors was probably going to pick up on this theme, this particular noxious strain in his past, but starting off there, in that dark bedroom… 

Dean puts his hand to his chest, gasping. It feels like his heart is banging up against something, each beat roaring in his ears.. Cas is at his side, hand on his shoulder. 

"I think there's something wrong with my chest," Dean manages to get out. He's too young to be having a heart attack, probably. 

He feels Cas place two fingers to his temple, then withdraw. 

"There's nothing wrong with your heart, Dean. I'm afraid you're having a panic attack." Cas' voice is too soft, too steady. 

"Okay, well, can you fix it?" Dean's breaths feel like they are pulling up short. He'll worry about the consequences to his pride later. 

"We're in your head, Dean. No, I can't fix it." 

Right. Dean kind of forgot. 

He bends over, places his hands on his knees. He feels absolutely wild with it, the fear. It's like… it's kind of like the time he caught the ghost sickness from that poor dead son of a bitch at the factory, when the contracted terror had nearly killed him. 

Which is crazy, because this is nothing. Dean is many things, but he's not a coward. This doesn't happen to him - if he fell apart like this in real life, he'd be long dead. 

Maybe that's the point of this place, to change him. To break him down. Worst hit after worst hit. 

Dean survives by not thinking about this shit. He knows he drinks too much and puts himself in danger and sometimes hurts the people he loves, but he's kept himself alive by a fucking thread at times by not marinating in his own worst memories. Maybe they're always there, tension beneath the surface, levee waiting to break, but Dean _manages._ He copes in the sense that he's always sort of waiting to die. This life, hunting, being hunted, you don't get the luxury of old age and you sure as hell don't get through what little time you have by trying to make your emotions stack up in neat little rows. 

You drink - Dean drinks, and he pushes people away, and he has nightmares. He endures. That's the best he's ever going to get, and he's okay with that. He's got low expectations. 

Seeing it all, piece by piece, neatly arranged theme by theme, it's making something in him crack. 

Dean gasps in shallow breaths, knees bent, head bowed toward the floor. 

He can't do this. 

Cas' fingertips lightly touch his shoulders, and when Dean doesn't push him away, his hands rest there, solid, heavy. 

"I can't," Dean realizes he's saying. It's the autopilot beneath the ongoing panic, the numbness still wrapped around his frantic heart. "I can't. I can't." 

God, he's like a little kid throwing a temper tantrum. Dean hates himself, hates this loss of control. His heart is beating so hard and he feels like he is practically out of his body. 

Cas' thumbs rub into his shoulders, pressure bearing down on him, circles of motion he feels through his jacket and two shirts. He's always wearing so many protective layers. It's a metaphor, like everything else. 

"You can, Dean. You're right - this is a fucked up spell." 

And it's funny, it's always funny to hear Cas swear, somehow. It's so human. 

"It's cruel. You shouldn't have to bare your soul like this. You shouldn't be forced to relive your trauma or talk about it until you're ready. That should be your choice, even if you're never ready. It's not fair, but you can do this. I know that you can." 

"Cas, I need you to stay here." 

"I'm not going anywhere, Dean." 

Dean shakes his head, pushes himself upright. "No, I mean, I need you to stay in this room. I can't have you in there with me. I can't… I don't want you to watch this." Dean lets himself fall back again the door for a moment. "I'd rather die," he says quietly. 

"I can try," Cas says, hesitant. "But I… I'm sorry, Dean, but I'm still in your head. I think I go where you go." 

Dean shakes his head. He's sweating. He needs… God, he needs something, anything. He needs pain, maybe. Sometimes that grounds him. He digs his fingernails into his palms. 

"Dean." Cas' thumbs stroke along his shoulders. 

Dean opens his eyes, and Cas is there, right in his personal space, his eyes made of light, looking like self-destruction. Dean's head isn't right, he's in the space behind the fifth door even though they've stepped out of it. He's already running through what it's going to show him, and it makes him feel crazy, desperate. He'd do anything, absolutely anything, to feel anything else. 

Dean makes a choice that makes sense in the rabbit-quick beat of his heart, the overwhelming, gnawing nothing in his pounding chest. He just wants to feel something, anything, outside of his head. Even if it destroys him. 

Cas is there. That's it, that's enough. Cas is there, in front of him, hands on him, so Dean wraps his arms around his neck, presses his body as hard as he can against him, and kisses him on the mouth. 

Cas freezes. 

His hands go still on Dean's shoulders, tightening outward from there, tension coalescing all along his body. 

His mouth is unmoving against Dean's, his chest and hips solid where Dean has pushed flush against them, but all of him tight with tension. 

Which. Okay. 

If Dean had paused at all to think about what he expected, which he emphatically did not do, he kind of… 

There's a part of him that, admittedly, he doesn't acknowledge, but that maybe kind of thought Cas might want to kiss him. Which is stupid, unbelievably stupid, because Dean knows that he's not good enough for Cas, not like this. And it's not like Cas has ever… Dean doesn't even know if Cas really has a sexual orientation, or even if - one or two exceptions standing - he really experiences that kind of attraction. 

Dean pulls away from Cas, drops his shaking hands off his neck. 

"Fuck. Sorry. Sorry." 

Cas stays frozen for a second, and Dean sure as hell can't look at him, so he wraps his arms around his stomach and looks at the floor, just trying to get air into his lungs. 

Cas finally unglues his hands from Dean's shoulder. He pushes Dean's face back up to look at him, and Dean can't help flinching. 

It's not like he thinks Cas will hit him. Not really. Some guys would, maybe most guys. But Cas is too weird. 

Cas' face looks… god, Dean doesn't even know. He can't really focus on him. 

"Not like this," Cas says. His stupid, gravel voice comes out even hoarser than usual. "Not as a way for you to hurt yourself. I won't be that for you." 

Which. Fuck. Sometimes Dean forgets that Cas has literally held Dean's soul in his hands. 

Dean nods, Cas' fingers still under his chin, and dry swallows. 

"Sorry," he says again. 

"I understand," Cas says, which is kind of the worst thing he could say. "It's okay." 

Cas hesitates, and then he moves his fingers from beneath Dean's chin to the side of his face, almost cupping his jaw, and runs his thumb once down Dean's cheek. 

Dean closes his eyes. The softness is worse than if Cas had punched him, in some ways. 

"Cas, I… I don't…" 

Cas lets his hand drop. "I know," he says, which isn't fair, because Dean doesn't even know what he was going to say. 

There's an awkward pause. Dean realizes dully that he's breathing again. His heart is still going too fast, but he doesn't feel like it's about to explode. 

Dean pushes a hand through his hair, clears his throat. "I guess one mortification kinda helps cancel out another, huh?" He says, trying to smile. 

Cas isn't buying it, but Dean's not really trying to sell. 

"We don't really have much choice about this, do we?" 

"No, not really." Cas looks up at the high ceiling with those far-off slits of light. "I can't tell how much time has passed, but we have to be getting close." 

And it's not like Dean is going to kill Cas. He's gotten his best friend killed enough. 

He puts his hand on the door knob behind him, closes his eyes again. 

"Cas…" 

Cas lets him fumble to the words this time. 

"I'm… this is… I don't talk about this. It was a long time ago. All of it. I'm not proud of some of the things I did, the choices I made. And you're gonna… you're gonna look at me different, after this. And that's fine, okay, but just… just promise me that you won't tell Sam. He doesn't know, and he can't. No one knows. I…" 

"I won't betray your secrets, Dean." 

"Okay." Dean turns, back squared. Hey, he's seen the End of Days, he can't let his own fucking head defeat him. He opens the door again. 

They're back in the dark bedroom. Dean knows now that he's eight years old, a shadowy shape on top of the covers, listening to his four-year-old brother breathe deeply in his sleep. 

The hallway creaks. Eight-year-old Dean reaches a hand under his pillow and touches the handle of a hunting knife. When he and Sammy are alone in motel rooms he usually sleeps with a sawed-off shotgun, but they're staying with a hunter friend of dad's while he's out working a job, and Dean had felt weird about bringing a firearm to bed in someone else's home. Not weird enough to go totally weaponless, though. 

The creaking gets closer, solidifies into light footsteps. The door pushes open and it's darkness opening onto more shadow. Dean can just barely make out the silhouette of Andy Bennett, the hunter they're staying with. He stands in the doorway for a long time, and eight-year-old Dean doesn't move, isn't sure if Andy can see him in the dark. 

After a few minutes, Andy moves into the room, quietly closing the door behind him. He comes over to Dean's bed and sits on the edge. 

"Dean," he whispers. It's barely a sound. "Are you awake?" 

"Yeah," Dean whispers back after a pause. 

Andy shifts and the bed makes little popping noises. He doesn't say anything for a minute, and then his fingers, which have been moving over the covers, find Dean's leg. 

Even then, Dean had learned to sleep fully-clothed on top of the covers, ready to leap up at a moment's notice. He doesn't move when Andy touches him. 

Now-Dean can't really see any of this happening from where he stands in the dark, but he remembers. 

Andy says "You're a good kid, Dean." His breath gets closer to Dean's face, and eight-year-old Dean is frozen. 

"A good big brother. It must be hard, always looking after Sam. Always moving around. Does anyone look after you, Dean?" 

Dean doesn't answer. It doesn't seem like a real question. 

"I'd like to look after you tonight. Will you let me do that? Take care of you?" 

And Dean… this isn't the first time grown men have said things to him. John's always leaving them at skeevy motels and hanging out in seedy bars. But it's the first time he's been cornered like this, actually been afraid. He slips his hand further under the pillow, but… Dean doesn't know if he could kill a human. He's already killed plenty of _things_ at eight years old, but a person? Someone who is a friend of dad's? 

"Hey now," Andy whispers, other hand on Dean's chest. "You'll be quiet, won't you? You don't want to wake Sam, do you?" 

And whether it's meant to be there or not, Dean hears the threat in that. And he thinks, eight years old and confused by what's happening, as long as it's not Sam. As long as he doesn't hurt Sammy. 

"Good boy," Andy says, when Dean pulls his hand back out from under the pillow. Andy skoots closer on the bed. "We'll be quiet," he says, and slides his hand into Dean's pants. 

The memory twists and turns, and then it's Dean at thirteen, in a motel office somewhere in Georgia, and the motel manager has realized that he appears to have two underage boys staying in one of his rooms alone and is threatening to call Child Protective Services. 

Dean tells him everything he can think of, tells him that he's sixteen, which surely is old enough to be looking after his little brother for a couple of days, tells him that of course their dad is staying with them, that John works two jobs and comes in late and leaves early, that's why he hasn't seen him since he dropped Dean and Sam off last Wednesday. 

When none of that flies, and John isn't answering his phone, Dean gives up his pride and begs, offers to do work around the motel, anything. 

The manager's face softens for the first time and he comes around his desk to stand in front of Dean, thirteen, skinny, boyish and pretty, cheeks still a little round. 

"Well, I suppose," the motel manager says, his voice rasping. "Let's see if we can't find a use for that pretty little mouth of yours." 

And then Dean is fourteen, standing on a street corner outside a sketchy bar in Tennessee, smoking a cigarette. He's trying to decide if it's worth going back in for another round of pool, worth trying to work his hustle a second time in the same location. That's always dangerous. But Dean kind of really needs the money. He's managed to rake up forty dollars, and in a normal week he could make that stretch for him and Sam. But dad dropped them off at the school here, and after three days Sam got moved into all AP classes, which means all new books. They don't have that kind of money, but Sam's excitement and pride at having been singled-out for advanced placement was palpable and Dean couldn't bear it when Sammy came down, realizing they couldn't give the school the money for the books. 

"It's okay, Dean," Sammy had said, in a sad little voice that broke Dean's heart. "I can just stay in the regular classes. They're fine." 

"Nah, come on, Sammy, the school's right. You're way too smart to be in with the rest of those chumps. Don't worry about it, I got you covered." 

So there he was, nowhere near the amount the school had asked for, worried not just that it would break his brother's heart but that the school might get suspicious if they didn't cough up. 

"You got a light?" 

A man in a slick gray suit, way too polished for this part of town, approached Dean on the corner, an unlit cigarette dangling loosely in his fingers. 

Dean dug his lighter out of his pocket and held it for the guy, who cupped his hands around the flame and took a long pull on his cigarette. 

Dean had a pack of Camel's that he'd bogarted off a drunk a few months back. He didn't smoke all the time, but nights like tonight… 

"How much?" The man asks after his second drag. 

Dean had gone back to staring at middle distance, but he turns back, brow furrowed. "What?" 

"How much? For, let's say an hour." 

Dean is absolutely lost. 

"What are you talking about?" 

"Oh come on," the man says, rolling his eyes. "Relax. I'm not a cop." 

He sticks his cigarette in his mouth and pulls out a black leather wallet as slick as his suit. "I got a room at the hotel a few blocks back. You can have it the rest of the night if you want. I just want the hour." 

And Dean, who has been made aware by this point just how pretty he is, gets it. "Hey, man," he says, taking a step back and holding up his hand. "I'm not-" 

"Look at me. You can name your price. I don't care." The man gestures arrogantly, carelessly, down his body. It is glaringly obvious that his suit is tailored, his shoes shined. He does not belong in this part of town and Dean understands that this is exactly why he's here. 

The man opens his wallet and counts out a small stack of cash. "Let's make this easy. What do you say to four hundred?" 

Dean stares at the cash. Because… fuck. It would be enough and then some. He could get Sammy his books, maybe take him to one of the cheap dental clinics to make sure he doesn't need braces or anything, maybe even get himself new shoes that don't have holes practically worn in the soles. 

Dean can hustle up enough money to make sure Sammy eats, and when he can't, he can always steal or grift their way to a meal. It's not always easy, but he always gets it done one way or another. When it comes down to it, thrift stores are cheap, or he can steal things like shoes and clothes. But there are some things, like dental cleanings or keeping up with vaccines, that Dean can't really lie and cheat his way through, that pool and card money doesn't usually cover. When they stay with Bobby he usually pays Dean for his help on cars, but they're only in South Dakota sporadically and Dean's too young to get apprenticed at any other mechanics.

When John told Dean to look out for his little brother, he meant keep Sammy alive. But Dean knows it's more than that. He knows that mom, at least, would have wanted more than that. 

So he makes appointments for Sam when he can, goes without food if he has to, whatever it takes to keep his baby brother alive and happy. 

Dean still hesitates, looking at four hundred dollars in cash and wondering if it's worth crossing this line. 

The man sighs. His eyes on Dean are hungry. "Come on," he says again. "Four hundred for an hour. You're not going to get a better offer tonight. We don't even have to fuck. I just want to slap you around a little and maybe use that mouth of yours." 

It makes the hairs go up on the back of Dean's arms. Now-Dean, tension coiled in his shoulders, watching this _transaction,_ remembers what fourteen-year-old Dean is thinking: He's already done this once for free. He might as well do it by choice, for money. 

Fourteen-year-old Dean takes the cash and stuffs it into his inside jacket pocket. The man smiles, turns around and starts walking down the block, knowing that Dean will follow him. 

And he does. 

And Dean is still just fourteen the first time he lets someone bend him over a hotel bed, burying his face in the clean-smelling sheets, biting his own wrist. Because once he'd come so far, what did it matter, anyway? He was already… _this._

The memories don't play all the way through, don't make Dean watch everything, just show him enough to remember, which of course he does. Just because he doesn't think about it doesn't mean he's forgotten. 

He remembers, after this first time, after the guy had left, how he'd sat on the floor in his boxers and cried silently into his hands for awhile. Then he'd picked himself up, taken a shower in the hotel bathroom, gotten dressed, and picked up a pizza for him and Sam on the way home. 

And Dean is fifteen when he gets his first kiss, which is absurd considering what he's been doing with his mouth and the rest of his body. Dean has never said he had a no-kissing rule, but most of the guys seem to assume he does and he certainly hasn't done anything to disabuse them of this notion. 

Dean figures out quickly that he can pretty much take his pick of customers if he finds the right street corners. He always tries to pick up the guys who look sad, tired, the ones who seem like they are just looking for an escape and not like they want to hurt him. Not that Dean can't take care of himself, but he'd rather it didn't come to that. 

It's the sad, tired, kind of schlumpy guy who kisses Dean who is also the first person to want to hold him after. He pulls Dean into his chest, their bodies aligned, spooning, just cuddling him. And what Dean hated in that moment more than anything was the realization that he wanted something like this. 

Not the man three times his age in an empty hotel room in the backwaters of Illinois, but… Dean hates himself for leaning into it, for how much he wants the attention. 

The memory pitches forward, reforms into a cabin in the woods in Montana. Now-Dean can't help himself letting out a sharp breath. 

By the time Dean was sixteen, he and Sam - well, mostly Sam - had figured out how to run strings of credit card scams. He'd mostly stopped doing any sex work after that, unless he really needed cash, keeping the option filed away carefully as one of his many contingency plans. 

Dean, now-Dean, knows it was a job. It's a real job real people have, and he knows that for some people it's a freely made choice, and he can respect that. Hell, he's paid a girl himself once or twice. 

But, for Dean, he'd hated it. Hated himself. He didn't even blame the guys who picked him up, really, he always told them he was sixteen or seventeen, whatever the age of consent was in whatever state he happened to be in. Once he'd started, he'd told himself it didn't matter. He already felt worthless, dirty, used up. 

So now-Dean knows that this cabin in Montana where an eighteen-year-old Dean is lounging on the old tan couch is not going to be about the sex work. He hates this place, this spell. It isn't fair. Dean shouldn't have to watch this. He shouldn't have to watch this with Cas standing next to him. 

Eighteen-year-old Dean is flopped on the couch, a glass of whiskey in his hand, watching the fire in the hearth crackle and pop. Sitting next to him, too close, is another hunter, twenty-something, shaggy brown hair, hazel eyes. Dean met Constantine two days back, both of them tracking signs of demonic activity. 

John and Sam were in Missoula, looking for books on demon lineage or something, and Dean had just been supposed to do some reconnaissance a few towns over. But then he'd run into Constantine, and together they'd run into the demon. It fled before they could exorcise it, black smoke billowing from the poor victim's mouth. The guy he'd been possessing hadn't made it. Dean and Constantine had salted and burned the body at the edge of Constantine's property, where his cabin sat in the middle of an acre of land. 

Constantine had invited Dean back for a drink, and it wasn't like anyone was waiting back at the motel for Dean, not unless he wanted to drive all the way back to Missoula that night. 

On the couch, Constantine's hand sits between them. He wears several iron rings on his fingers, which Dean makes a mental note of for ghosts. 

The air in the cabin smells pleasantly like fire and pine. Dean kind of loves it there. He thinks that if he ever had his own place, ever stopped moving around, he'd want something like this. 

"Really nice place you got here, man," he says. 

Constantine smiles at him. Like all hunters, he looks older than his age, but he's still handsome, still clinging to a bit of youth. "Thanks," he says. "The only problem is the winters. You can get snowed in up here and if you don't prepare you could starve before anyone clears the roads. Last winter I was trapped up here nearly three weeks. I was living off of whiskey and pickles by the end." He laughs and takes a sip of his drink now. "Word to the wise, don't put the two together." 

Dean grins. He knows all about experimental cooking. "My brother, Sam, he _hates_ pickled anything, but one time all we had in the kitchen was some sweet pickled onions and some milk that was probably a week past its expiration date. And I thought 'hey, French onion soup is a thing.' Let me tell you, it did not increase Sam's willingness to eat pickled foods." 

Constantine laughs again. Eighteen-year-old Dean's ear tips go pink. Now-Dean remembers. He'd felt so pleased that he could make this older, independent hunter laugh like that. 

When Constantine leans over and kisses him, he's not really surprised. And it's not unwelcome. He's a little older than him, yeah, but Dean's eighteen now, and he's never been with another hunter. He likes the idea, likes the thought of not having to hide parts of himself from someone. 

He gets the feeling there aren't a lot of queer guys in the hunting business. Or at least, Dean's never met one before. 

Constantine's hands are warm and he tastes like whiskey as he lays Dean down on the couch. 

It's all fine and dandy so far. Constantine asking "Is this okay?" as he touches Dean in progressively more intimate parts, Dean nodding and arching his body up to meet him, wanting in a way he's not really used to. 

Now-Dean is shaking, standing as far back from the couch as he can get in the small living room of the cabin. 

He shouldn't have to watch this. 

Dean can't stand that Cas is seeing this, is going to see Dean have sex with another man out of his own choice. He wonders what Cas thinks this is about, as his eighteen-year-old self makes out with the hunter. Dean sneaks a look at Cas, whose expression appears purposefully blank. He's pretty sure Cas is seeing Constantine the way that Dean had seen him, that he'll see the memory as it was through Dean's eyes and not Constantine's true face. 

Dean is still shaking, shame and rage and something that he doesn't have the words for coursing through his body, threatening to spill out in a wordless scream. 

Dean doesn't know when Cas takes his hand - or, maybe more likely at this point, if Dean reached for him. He just realizes slowly, then in a blink of surprise, that his fingers are between Cas' fingers, gripping his hand hard, and Cas is gripping back, giving him pressure, giving him something to hold on to. 

Dean can't explain the relief of it. 

There's no fastforwarding this time, no skipping ahead, and Dean bears most of it out with his eyes closed, but he can still hear it, still remember it. 

He hears it when Constantine says "You like this don't you?" and Dean's breathless, wordless agreement. 

He hears Constantine's little half-laugh and then "You know, you're starting to make a name for yourself. I'd heard about you of course, the famous Dean Winchester, John Winchester's perfect little prodigy." 

And Dean remembers he hadn't gotten it yet, his confusion, mid-act, that Constantine was bringing this up. 

"So imagine my surprise when I heard a little rumor -" and Dean remembers too, remembers exactly the shift and how it had started to hurt. "That famous Dean Winchester had a little secret. What a sweet surprise to learn that you were a nice receptive little bitch." And past-Dean doesn't understand yet, but he at least realizes something is wrong and tries to shove Constantine off of him. "You know the best part?" Constantine goes on, pinning down Dean's wrists. "He really was into you. It's so easy, when their body's already hot for someone." 

And Dean knows without having to look that Constantine's eyes have gone black, his grin maniacal. 

Cas' fingers twitch between Dean's and Dean realizes he's digging his nails into the skin of Cas' knuckles. 

"That's right, baby, give it up for me," the demon says, laughing, as Dean struggles beneath him. A second later, he's finishing, still laughing, and he hasn't worn a condom, and it's awful, and then he's pressing a pillow over Dean's face, saying "You can take some of me with you to the afterlife, sweetheart." 

Eighteen-year-old Dean stops scrabbling at the demon's hands as he presses the pillow over his nose and mouth, suffocating him. He fumbles instead for his clothes, discarded on the floor. He's going lightheaded by the time he fishes the necklace out of his jeans pocket and blindly shoves the Magen David into the demon's face. 

Now-Dean finally opens his eyes again. The demon screams and lets go of the pillow to clutch at his burning skin, swatting the pendent to the ground, but it's enough. Dean leverages the demon off of him, throwing them both to the hard floor of the cabin. He grabs the Star of David and shoves it into the demon's mouth and while he's choking, tongue burning, Dean runs through the exorcism he knows by heart, the one he should have used earlier that day when he'd had the chance. 

The black smoke curls out of his mouth, shrieking as it runs over the holy symbol, disappearing into the air in the shiver of Latin. 

Constantine's body lies there, naked, broken, and Dean wonders how long he's been mortally wounded, what the demon did to him, when he had the chance to take possession. 

Eighteen-year-old Dean kneels over the body for a long time, panting, frozen. He doesn't cry. 

The memory swirls and blends, and Dean thinks this will be it, but no, it turns into another hotel room, one of the thousands from Dean's life, but this one is a 5-star, swanky, sleek suite, and there's only one period in Dean's life when he was staying in places like this. 

Now-Dean can't get up any emotion at all as he watches his demon self in a foursome with Crowley. As Crowley goes down on him, and one of the blonde women in bed with them gasps and says "God that's so hot" and sticks her tongue in demon-Dean's mouth. 

And yeah, demon-Dean was into it, into both of them, but it's _Dean's_ body and he hates remembering what he did with it, what was done to it when he, human-Dean, now-Dean, wasn't in charge. 

The memory twists and tumbles and spits them out once more into the room with the doors. Dean lets the weight of it all bring him to his knees, and then he's laying down, flat on his back, covering his face with his hands and feeling the whole world tilting. 

It's not fair. He didn't ask for this. He was coping fine. It should get to be his choice, one goddamn thing about all of this should get to be his choice, and that agency has been ripped away from him again, his darkest parts split open and his insides turned out without his consent. 

Dean would take death at this point. 

He feels Cas settling down next to him, and after a moment, Cas' knee nudges against Dean's head. Then Cas' hand. Then Cas gently pulls Dean's head into his lap, and Dean lets him. Cas' fingers hesitantly thread into Dean's hair and Dean shivers. 

They're silent for what feels like hours. 

"I'm sorry, Cas," Dean finally says, hands still over his face. "I think we're gonna die here." 

Cas doesn't answer, but his fingers work further into Dean's hair, stroking just his hair at first, then deeper still until he's basically massaging Dean's scalp. 

Dean can't remember the last time he was touched like this. 

Actually, Dean is struggling to think of the last time he had sex, and it's making him feel panicky that he can't remember. If he doesn't count demon-Dean, and he doesn't, then… God. Dean can't remember. He knows he hasn't brought anyone back to the bunker, obviously, but surely he'd hooked up with a waitress or something on one of their road trips. He's coming up suspiciously empty and it makes him feel kind of queasy. He used to pick up someone new, mostly women, on almost every trip. It was part of proving to himself that he was desirable, that he wasn't all-the-way-down broken, at least. Plus it was fun. 

But, God, the last time can't have been all the way back to Benny, can it? That's the last person Dean is sure of, but surely he's been with someone since Purgatory, surely there was a tipsy one night-stand in there somewhere or a hasty hookup in a grimy bathroom stall. 

Because, if the last person really was Benny… Hell if Dean knows what that says about him. 

Dean's not gay. He doesn't really know what he is. Bi, probably. He likes guys, likes girls, probably likes other genders as well. It took him awhile to figure out, because when he'd been having sex with guys for money he'd still thought he was straight, and he knows he still has some hangups about it. He still kind of holds sex with other men in this different space then sex with women, maybe wherever trauma lives in the body. He has to go into himself and untie a bunch of knots and caution tape before he lets himself be attracted to men. 

Dean's never talked about it with Sam, although he's pretty sure his brother knows he's not straight. They've lived together most of their lives, after all. 

Dean's never talked about it with Cas, either. 

He doesn't talk about it with anybody, because it's nobody's business. He likes who he likes and anybody who has a problem with it can get fucked. 

Except, of course, that Dean still has a problem with it, apparently. 

Dean lets out a long sigh, hoping that maybe by the end of it he'll have found the words. He hasn't, so he just says, into his hands, "Promise me you won't tell Sam." 

"I won't tell Sam," Cas says faithfully. He pauses, and Dean is afraid of that pause, afraid of the way Cas thinks. "You could though, you know. If you ever wanted to. I'm not saying you should, just that you can." 

Dean huffs into the darkness of his hands. "'Hey Sammy, remember when you needed money to go to the model U.N. in middle school? Yeah, I financed your political ambitions by sleeping with a Senator's aid, ain't that irony for ya?' Yeah. That would go real well." 

"Sam wouldn't judge you," Cas says quietly. His fingers are still working in Dean's hair. 

"For this? Of course he would. He'd be so pissed, man. I mean yeah, you'd think after I sold my soul for him, it'd be no surprise that I sold my body to put food on the table for us sometimes, but…" 

"I'm sorry, Dean. You shouldn't have had to do that." 

"Yeah. Whatever." 

Cas places his free hand on Dean's chest, tentatively, hovering above Dean's heart, letting him know he'll move if Dean asks. Dean places one of his own hands on top of Cas', lets himself feel it. And okay, so it's not normal. Who cares? 

Sometimes, in the bitterest, unguarded part of Dean's head, he can't help blaming John. For leaving them with strangers, for not taking into account how much growing boys eat, for only ever seeing the job and not the sons he was neglecting. For making Dean into a parent without giving him the tools to take care of Sammy. 

Dean tried. He tried so damn hard. He'd given everything for his family, everything he ever had to offer. 

Dean, at eight, at thirteen, at fourteen, had been making the choices that he thought he had to, the only choices that he thought he could. Dean had taken it all on and he'd never told anyone and he'd never complained. Outside, looking in, Dean knows he was just a kid doing the best he could with what he'd been given. He'd been aiming for survival, and he'd gotten himself and Sammy there, hadn't he? 

Short of running away, of going to Bobby or letting Sam get taken by CPS, Dean doesn't really know what else he could have done. 

"Could I tell you something I realized?" Cas asks. 

Dean would really like to say no, but, well. Who knows how much time they have left? 

"Yeah, I guess." 

"It's something I never really understood about you before. You remember the day we first met topside?" 

"You mean when I stabbed you?" 

"Yes." Dean can hear the smile in Cas' voice. "I thought that was quite quaint and a little adorable. But I remember, I was surprised that you were so resistant to the idea of angels. That you didn't believe you deserved to be saved. I didn't really know you back then, just what I'd seen of your soul and that you were the Righteous Man. And from those things, I couldn't understand why you would think you were anything less than worthy." Cas' hands are warm where they touch him. 

"Dean, you deserved to be saved as a child. You deserved to be protected." 

It's… Okay, so it's… 

Dean makes a noncommittal noise. "Yeah, okay." 

"You deserved to be saved," Cas says insistently. 

"Okay, Cas, I know." 

"Do you? You deserved to be saved, Dean." 

Dean sits up, pulls away from Cas' touch. He stands. 

"Alright, I hear you. Stow the Good Will Hunting crap, okay?" 

_It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault._

"I don't understand that reference," Cas says. He gets to his feet. "But you did, Dean. You do. You deserved to be saved." 

"Shut up." 

Dean is… he's drifting. He thinks about something he sometimes says to Sammy, his way of telling him without telling him, a line from a Wes Anderson film. 

_I'm not even here right now, I'm in Cheyenne, Wyoming._

Dean can only imagine how baffled this would make Cas, and he wonders again why he had to choose to be best friends with someone who does not get a single one of his pop culture references. 

Then again, maybe he didn't really choose Cas so much as he woke up one day and found that Cas had somehow become family, become as close as Bobby, as close as anyone would ever get to Sam. 

"No," Cas says, infuriating, irascible, impossible. "You deserved to be saved." 

Dean's eyes are burning. 

Cas does not touch him, does not force him, but he holds out his arms and Dean… Dean sort of falls into Cas, lets Cas wrap his arms around him, not so much a hug as being held, warmth and strength and protection. 

"You deserved to be saved," Cas whispers, tells him, promises. 

And Dean is shaking, crying, breaking in his arms. 

Dean was never a child. He was never a child. Because children deserve to be saved, protected, loved. He knows that. The only way to reconcile that belief and the incongruous way he grew up, the things that happened to him, was to believe equally that he was different - stronger, competent, unbreakable. Older on the inside. It was okay, because Dean was tough, he could take it. 

"You deserved to be saved. You deserve to be saved. I would give anything to have been able to protect you." 

It's the present tense of Cas' second sentence that undoes Dean. Like there is still something in him worth saving. Like Cas knows he's still in it, understands what this spell seems to understand so cruelly, that some part of Dean is still living in these moments. 

Cas is all warmth and strong arms, and Dean thinks about what it would be like if he had met Castiel earlier in his life - Castiel the angel of the lord, not Cas his best friend. About what it might have been like to be protected, watched over by him, saved by him. 

Dean doesn't need saving. He saves his own goddamn self. He survives. Surviving has always been enough. 

But he can’t help the thought of fourteen-year-old Dean, skinny and hollow-cheeked, his big eyes tired and trapped, how it would have felt to see Cas smile at him the way he looked at the memory of young Dean. How it would have felt to know what tenderness looks like. 

And all of a sudden, Dean understands what Cas meant by transcendent love. It’s the way that Dean still lives in these memories, the way that he’s - and he’d never admit this, never use the words - retraumatized by it all. That’s as real to now-Dean as it was to his past selves. But maybe it goes the other way too. Maybe if the multitude, the past-Deans, are still a part of him, then maybe what he feels now echoes back into them. Maybe giving in to the idea of how it would have felt, how it could have been, maybe that stitches something together in the part of Dean that holds all of this. It’s the caring, not the letting go. 

It’s like thinking of the multiverse, how maybe out there is a parallel Dean who grew up safe, a Dean who wouldn’t be standing where he is now. It’s imagining himself as loved, of loving himself enough in the act to imagine it. 

Love is a paradox, it seems. 

Dean is still wrapped up in Cas’ arms when the fifth door bursts into flames. They both loosen their hold on each other as they turn to look, but neither of them let go. Cas turns his eyes back to Dean, but Dean isn’t ready to be looked at. He buries his face back in Cas’ shoulder, and Cas’ arms tighten around his back again. 

It’s just, it’s nice. 

Dean doesn’t know if he believes that he deserved to be saved, not in so many words. He can’t get there that quickly after a lifetime of justification. It’s just that he’s starting to understand that he was a child. Just a dumb kid, someone adult Dean would want to protect himself. 

So letting Cas hold him, it’s kind of… it’s stupid and weird and he’s certainly not going to ever say it to Cas, but it’s kind of like letting Cas hold that dumb kid. 

Dean has no idea when was the last time someone held him. 

They’re still standing there like that when Cas makes a startled sort of noise and he flickers. 

There’s no other way to describe it - his whole body, the glow and the image of him, flickers like a static picture on television. Dean steps back, one hand on Cas’ shoulder. 

“Cas?” 

Cas comes back into focus, then flickers again. 

“Cas!” Dean knows his own voice is desperate, but he can’t. He can’t do this alone. Not now. 

Cas comes back into focus again, resettling, and he steps back from Dean, looking at his own hands. 

“That was Sam,” he says. “I gave him an Enochian symbol to try and call me back if I hadn’t returned in two hours.” 

Which means it’s been seven hours. Which, knowing how Heaven likes its symbolism and symmetry, might very well mean that it’s already too late. 

Well, what the hell at this point, right?

Dean grabs Cas’ hand and pulls him through the sixth door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Content Warnings: Childhood sexual abuse, underage sex work, sexual assault, coercion, panic attack, re-traumatization.
> 
> I tried my best to talk about what Dean has been through in a way that was explicit without being particularly graphic. There's a scene of coercion/sexual assault as an adult that has a little bit more detail than the other scenes, but hopefully in a way that provides information without eroticizing the violence. As Dean learns that his trauma is, in fact, trauma, hopefully this is reflected in treating that trauma as something not to be romanticized or glorified.


	5. The Nicest Angel You Have (Door Six)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings in end notes

This one is different. Castiel can tell that this one is different from the way Dean’s shoulders roll back. Dean’s expression, which had been opening up - forcibly, devastatingly, but still opening - falls, flattens, tries to undo itself into something blank and impenetrable. Cas notices, can’t help noticing, that it doesn’t quite work. Whatever mechanism inside of Dean that let him shove his feelings up into some deep, dark, unreachable place, it’s broken or breaking. The box is waterlogged, cardboard in a storm, it can’t contain him. 

Cas thinks of this like a sickness, it has to get worse before it can get better. It's a cruel ward, this spell that was safeguarding the sanctuary. Cas can see how it is stripping Dean down, how it is progressively challenging him. And now that Dean has been hit over and over with his own traumatic past, now that he's a little cracked, a little open, Cas watches the ward tear into his weakened defenses. 

Because this memory is Dean - it's all Dean. It's a faith-healer's tent in Nebraska, and Cas has seen enough con-artist faith-healers in his life to know that there is something wrong with this one, even if he can only see the memory through Dean's human eyes. The memory is Dean being healed, seeing the reaper shackled to this place, realizing that his life was at the expense of another. It's having to make the choice who lives or dies. It's failing to save the girl who had faith. 

It's flashing snapshots of people Dean couldn't save - a kid in Iowa, college students haunted by the ghost of a classmate, fellow hunters… 

Cas watches as all of Dean tightens, tries to hold on to whatever it is inside of him that copes with his own self-hatred and guilt, but he's sliding. He's dropped Cas' hand and is standing with his arms crossed over his chest, letting the memories wash over him. Like this is something he deserves too. 

It's Dean, in the hospital after Alistair, telling Cas that he can't do it, that it's too much. 

_I guess I'm not the man either of our dads wanted me to be._

After all of this, and Dean still can't see. 

Castiel didn't really understand human feelings before he rebelled, before he fell. He'd always had something in him, he'd always cared too much, always been feeling blindly along the crack in his chest that had been shaped something like a question mark and is now closer to a yawning chasm. Cas has always cared and he has always doubted, but emotions… they weren't the same in Heaven. 

Cas does not think there is anything to say to Dean as he struggles with his guilt, his sense of failure, because Dean was the one who taught Cas how to feel guilt and shame in the first place. Dean taught Cas how to care - not in words, no, but in every action Dean has ever taken, everything he's ever done. It is stitched up in his very soul, that deep well of caring. Cas knows. Cas has touched that soul. He remembers, reaching Dean in Hell, expecting to find the Righteous Man who had been broken. And a part of him had been. A part of him still might be. But Dean's soul… it glowed and ached and pulsed, and… It wasn't beautiful in a way that Cas can find a way to make sense of in human language. _Beautiful_ implies so many things about a physical form, speaks to appeal, to symmetry, to something you would want to look at. 

Dean's soul wasn't beautiful. It was… there's a word in Enochian that means something like _blinding_ , something between the _mysterium tremendum_ and the sudden knowledge that there was a deficit, a famine, before this thing was known. 

Cas remembers being floored by it, when he touched Dean's soul, when he gripped him tight and raised him from perdition and stitched him back into that body in the ground. It was overwhelming, how his soul showed his essence so clearly. 

Dean is love. He is love, and loved, and loving, in all tenses, from every angle. It is the crux, the fulcrum, the heart of him. 

And love… Cas loved in an abstract way before Dean. He loved God - his Father, his Creator, his Judge and Redeemer. He loved his brethren, their garrison. He loved their cause. He loved humanity, even. But it was like… Love, as a servant of Heaven, was true and real, but in the way that surface level pain is still pain. There is a difference between pain that is inflicted on skin and the pain that goes bone deep, pain that makes internal and external indistinguishable because it is all raw and inflamed and unbearable. 

It was unbearable, at first, to love as humans do. 

And then it was, is, the only thing that matters. 

Cas knows the guilt Dean bears, and he loves him for it, loves him for caring. But it is a weight that buckles Dean, a burden he cannot see as anything but his own shortcomings, his sense of failure that goes beyond any individual action and is tied instead to the fabric of his being. This "not enough" nonsense that Cas tries to be patient with, tries to understand. 

Dean is _good._ Full stop. Not perfect, obviously. Like all humans, he is deeply, irrevocably flawed. 

There'd been one night in a hotel room in Missouri or Louisiana or Mississippi, somewhere like that, not too long ago, when Dean had dragged Cas along on a hunt for something that was eating people. Sam had been occupied with research, and Dean didn't want to go alone. It wasn't like Dean wasn't perfectly capable of hunting solo, but Cas let himself get roped into the road trip. Dean doesn't like being by himself, and Cas is always… Cas prefers to watch over him, when he can. 

It was after they'd killed the rougarou, Dean having wrestled with it and refusing to let Cas heal his bruises, icing his arm back in the hotel room. Dean flipped through the TV channels, but the only thing on besides infomercials and static was a children's cartoon. 

"I don't understand," Cas said, when Dean paused on the movie. "Why is animation always aimed towards children?" 

Dean looked at him like he was biting back laughter. "Well, Cas, not all of it is." 

Cas had frowned at him, the two of them sitting on opposite hotel beds, but Dean hadn't elaborated. Cas had gotten the idea, as Dean smiled to himself, that it was a joke he wouldn't understand. 

There is so much about being human Cas doesn't think he'll ever truly comprehend. 

"Anyway, this one's a good one, far as kids movies go, I guess." Dean leaves the movie on, puts the remote aside, and settles back with his ice pack and a beer. 

"What's it about?" 

"Just watch it, Cas." 

Cas doesn't really _get_ movies either. Dean has made him watch a few now, and he tries to pay attention, but mostly he ends up listening to Dean's responses, his huffs of laughter or his muttering of "that's not how you kill that". Cas finds the whole film industry to be contrived and problematic, and while sometimes he can understand the emotional appeal of a story, it takes too long to get through a two-hour narrative for what Cas feels could usually have been told in about ten minutes or less. 

A half hour and several commercial breaks into the animated movie, Dean had put his empty beer bottle and ice pack aside and slid down on top of the covers with his jacket over his torso. His voice was warm and sleepy when he pointed at the TV and said "Hey Cas, that's you." 

The movie appeared to be about a little blue extraterrestrial creature, or possibly an angel, Cas wasn't sure, who had fallen to earth and was bonding with a human child to somewhat disastrous results. 

"That's what it was like trying to teach you about being human." Dean chuckled. 

"I have never dressed up as Elvis," Cas said. 

"Give me time, man," Dean said, eyes closed, yawning. He scrunched further into his mattress and turned his head away from the screen. "Don't watch me sleep." 

"Okay," Cas said, knowing he was lying. 

"Mm," Dean mumbled, also clearly aware that Cas was lying. 

Soon, Dean was snoring lightly, his shoulders finally relaxed, his face softened in sleep. Dean's raw soul was beyond physical attributes, but Dean the man, the whole of him, was beautiful. 

Cas watched the rest of the movie. He still didn't really get most of it, but there was one line that turned over and over in his mind as he watched over Dean that night. 

_This is my family. I found it all on my own. It is little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good._

It had made Cas' heart do a funny human thing, that swelling sensation in his chest, the same feeling he got when he watched Dean sleep. He'd applied that line to his family of course, Dean and Sam, Team Free Will, but he also thought it was such a simple, ingenious statement on humanity. 

Dean might be broken or flawed, or however he sees himself, but he is still good. Still good. 

Dean's memory turns to another hospital, and present-day Dean makes a strangled noise where he stands beside Cas.

Cas was actually there for part of this one. He watches the part he didn't see, the part where past Dean hovers in the doorway and tells Lisa and Ben Braeden that he was the guy who hit them with his car. Past Dean looks as broken as Cas had ever seen before this spell. 

To Cas' surprise, as the hospital is swirling around them, reforming into something unknown, present-day Dean says "I know that all of that… I know I shouldn't have handled things like that." 

Cas looks at him, waiting. 

"I mean, I should never have…" Dean gives one of his humorless laughs and rubs the back of his neck. "I should never have gone to Lisa in the first place, never dragged her and Ben into the crapshow of my life. But I did that, I did it, and I didn't have the right to undo it." Dean takes a deep breath, looks up at the ceiling forming above this new memory. His eyes are bright. "It wasn't my right to take their memories, to erase a year of their lives. It's not… that was a violation of just about every rule in the book. And I tell myself it was to protect them, but maybe I just didn't think I'd be strong enough to stay away if there was still any possibility of that life left." 

Cas is silent for a moment. They're in a middle-class American house, nondescript and boring. Past-Dean is speaking to a woman, or something that looks like one. 

"And if there was a possibility of it? If you could give them their memories back now?" 

"No," Dean says immediately. "No, Cas. Anything I do from here, after all this time, it would just make things worse. And anyway, I'm not… I'm never going to have that apple pie life. Not with anyone. I'm not looking for that. It was a mistake to ever try. Maybe the worst mistake of my life, for what I did there. But I just get to live with the guilt of what I did. That's all I can do." 

Past Dean stabs the woman in the chest. Cas assumes that she's not human, but she looks as mundane as her house. A door creaks and Dean looks up, is confronted by a young boy standing at the front door. 

"The only person I'm going to kill is you," the boy tells Dean. 

"Yeah, well, look me up in a few years," past-Dean says. 

The Dean standing next to Cas shakes his head, watching it all happen. "You know, I know this was the wrong call too. What I did here… Sam was right. I made the wrong choice, and it's unforgivable." Dean's voice is oddly calm. "I mean, I know why I did it. I know exactly why I thought I had to, but… it's hard to understand how I was thinking back then. Everything was so… You were gone and I was so angry with you, man, but I… And I was still so scared for Sammy. And I'd just gotten my leg back. And it felt like there was nothing I could do - I couldn't save you, couldn't help Sam, had no idea what to do about the Leviathan." Dean takes a deep breath. The memory morphs and fades around them as he speaks. 

"What was she?" Cas asks. "The woman." 

"Kitsune." Dean looks around, taking in the dim lighting and deep woods of Purgatory, and sighs. "Killing her was… I _thought_ I was doing the right thing, but I know what a hypocrite that makes me. I mean, Jesus, Cas, there's so much blood on my hands sometimes I think another hunter ought to just take me out." 

Cas watches as past Dean, Benny, and Castiel approach the glowing blue portal in Purgatory. They all look so worn out and dirty. 

"And what about the people you save, Dean?" Cas asks mildly. 

Dean is silent. His eyes are fixed on his memory too. And even though this is one of the few things they've ever really talked about, even though none of this was Dean's fault, Cas can still see the spasm of anguish in Dean's face as the Castiel in Purgatory pulls his hand back. He can see that to Dean, this was still somehow failing. 

"Dean," Cas says, trying to put the apology he knows Dean won't let him get out into his name. "You did not fail me." 

"'Course I did, Cas," Dean mumbles. 

"But you know that I-" 

"You were choosing to stay. Yeah. And I should have seen that. I should have seen you weren't thinking straight, should've tried harder to convince you to come home." 

How strange it is, Cas thinks, to dissect the word "home." He had never called Heaven that, certainly never called anywhere on Earth that, before Dean. Humans are so odd with their languages - their euphemisms and colloquialisms have always baffled Cas. It's impossible to keep up with, the rate at which language evolves. So Cas doesn't know when the word "home" developed from a house or other dwelling in which one lives to have the connotations of feeling, to have it understood that home was people. In the same way that Cas doesn't know when his own understanding of "home" became "family". 

Cas knows what it is to be broken. He knows what it is to fail. What it is to betray his family, in every sense of the word. He knows, too, that if he were the one to have tripped the ward, he probably wouldn't survive it. 

Dean's hands might be bloody, but they are nothing compared to Cas' own. 

Purgatory drops away and now it's the mark, past Dean pale and _wrong,_ somehow, like his soul is being drained out of him, like all that love is turning to hate. It had been a slow change, when Cas had watched it in real time. Seeing the shift all at once is jarring. 

The Dean beside Cas gives a little shudder, shoulders twitching back, trying to straighten his spine, trying to form his defenses. 

"I'm sorry," he whispers, but it's not to Cas, not really. 

Cas wonders if he should take Dean's hand again or touch his shoulder, but he doesn't. Touch is a strange human thing, too. Cas' understanding of physical affection and comfort is limited, but he knows Dean's relationship with it is volatile. He understands why better now with a sick, burning anger. 

Present-day Dean looks… defeated. He watches himself murder that family, his past self all stonefaced and dead-eyed. And then past Cas is there, confronting him, telling him that in a hundred years, a thousand, Cas will be the one who is still there with him, who will have to watch him turn all the way. 

In all the times that Dean has been angry with Cas, the times he's been furious, even when he was literally ready to kill Cas, he's never looked at Cas the way he does with the mark burning through his veins. 

Dean's been angry with him plenty, but even in all his fury, there was still love there. Deep, deep down, maybe, but in there somewhere. Cas knows enough by now to understand that love is a good 30-40 percent irritation. With Dean Winchester, it's more like 50-60 percent. And it runs both ways. 

"Dean," Cas says, as past Dean proceeds to beat past Cas up. "Nobody else sees you this way, you know." 

Dean blinks, pulls himself back, still watching the memory out of the corner of his eye as he glances at present-day Cas. "What?" 

Cas gestures vaguely before them. "Nobody else sees you this way. There is not a single person in your life that looks at you and thinks first about the mistakes you've made or the ways you think you've failed. The people who care about you, they see you for more than what you have been through, more than your faults. You're a good man, Dean." 

Dean's shoulders tense and he turns his face back to the fight in front of them, Dean pinning Cas to the ground, Cas holding on to his wrist, looking up at him with blood in his mouth. 

"Not sure now is the moment for you of all people to be trying to tell me that," present-day Dean says.

Cas smiles a little. "You've forgiven me for worse." 

Dean rubs the back of his neck. "Yeah. Well. What can I say, I'm a sucker for trainwrecks." Dean is quiet for a moment. "Look, Cas, I hear you, okay? I know you and Sam, don't… but that just makes it worse in a way. Like I've got you both duped into thinking there's something worth sticking around for in here." Dean taps his own chest. He sounds tired, more than anything else. "I mean look at me. You've just seen everything that I… I don't know. I hear what you're saying. And intellectually, I guess I know I've done some good in the world. But it's not… that doesn't erase this." He gestures as past Dean stabs the angel blade into the book beside Cas' head. "I can't ever erase this." 

"So don't erase it," Cas says, and he thinks some exasperation has spilled into his tone because Dean looks at him again as the memory shifts. "Why do you have to erase the bad in order for the good to matter? Why does it never go the other way for you? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, all that guilt you carry around on your shoulders is a sign of how much you _care?_ So you can't let go or scrub yourself free of it - at least you still feel that guilt, that thing that makes it so next time you won't make the same mistakes, that thing that makes you still want to do good after all the terrible choices you have been forced to make. It hurts because you care." 

"Cas, I'm…" Dean trails off, looking at the hotel room they're standing in. Past-Dean is laying on the bed, seemingly dead, his knuckles bloody and his face all beat to hell. "I don't know. Okay? I don't know. I'm just… I'm broken, man." 

Cas takes a deep breath himself as Crowley walks into the room. 

"You're not broken. Or if you are, no matter how little and broken, you are still good. Yeah, still good." 

Dean looks at him strangely. And then his face breaks into a grin. It's tired and only half-there, but it's real. The first real smile Dean's given him since they've been inside his head. It makes Cas' heart do funny human things, like it always does. 

"Did you just… did you just quote fucking _Lilo & Stitch _ at me, man?" 

"Did I not do it right?" 

Dean tips back his head and laughs. It's short, but genuine, and he's still shaking his head, smiling, when he stops. 

"You're a weird dude, you know that?" Dean says, but he says it like it's a compliment, and Cas doesn't mind. 

The past Dean on the hotel bed opens his eyes. They're black all the way through. 

*** 

Dean feels stripped down. He's rubbed raw and vulnerable and he doesn't know what to possibly do with that. If they were awake, Dean would be drinking. He'd drink himself into a blackout. He'd stay low-key drunk for a couple of days, probably, pretending not to notice when Sam steals his keys or that glasses of water keep appearing outside his bedroom door. He'd numb and numb until he's numb enough to remember how to do it himself. Until he feels like he's at least wearing skin again, not just this mess of exposed veins and live wires. 

And then he'd kill things. He'd throw himself into the fire. He'd race on ahead into whatever trouble he could find, because that's what he does. He'd move the fuck on. 

But this… 

It's like this fucking sadistic piece of angel magic is trying to tell him something about himself, but in a way that Dean just… he's not built to do this. Sam could, maybe. Sammy would probably come through this feeling like he's been to some born-again trial by fire. Sam is "in touch with his emotions", whatever that is supposed to mean, so yeah, he'd probably be fine. 

Dean isn't fine. 

It takes an awful lot to say that, even in his own head, but he's too raw to lie to himself, and of course he's not fucking fine. 

After being bludgeoned and cracked open by all the shit that's happened to him, being hit with the worst of his own choices, his own failures, it's like claws pulling his chest open wide. 

And the thing about it is that Dean can sort of… It's just, having had his past parcelled up and handed to him with neat little labels like this, there's some amount of recognition forming in the back of his head that he doesn't want to look at because it scares the shit out of him. 

But as he's being jerked along through the helter-skelter of his own backlog of guilt, Dean is sort of starting to understand that the way that he feels about each of these… these trespasses isn't isolated. The guilt that he feels about failing people, that deep down desperate guilt that is wormed into the marrow of his bones, it's about what he's done, yeah, but Dean is cracked open and he can't help but put two and two together. It's also about what's been done to him. 

Now-Dean watches demon-Dean look up at Crowley and smirk, watches Crowley's smug smile in response. 

Dean knows what happens after this, what being Crowley's hound was like. It's more blood washed over his already red hands. 

Dean kinda wishes Cas wasn't being so nice to him. Kinda wants to yell at him that he, Dean, doesn't need or like to be treated gently. He wouldn't be as nice to Cas, if the tables were turned. He hasn't been, when they were. 

_No one cares that you're broken._

Instead, Cas is being tenderly exasperated with Dean's self-pity. He's quoting fucking Disney movies to him. Jesus, he'd held Dean and let him cry in his arms like a child. And Dean's too torn apart to hate himself properly for that on top of everything else. Maybe later, if there's time. 

After everything, Cas is still insistently, obnoxiously, awkwardly, trying to tell Dean that he's not worthless. After he's seen so much more than anyone else was ever supposed to. 

No one is supposed to know about this shit. No one is supposed to know, because if he'd ever talked about it, if he'd ever told anyone, then at least one other person would know: _Dean_ would know. 

Thirty years in Hell broke Dean, and the _thing_ that he became there for the next ten years was just a scab, just the thinnest shell over his bloody, oozing, open sores. When he'd woken up topside in that pine box, he'd done everything out of instinct. He'd felt like he was in a dream. He'd just tried to pretend he was still some version of himself, something other than the whites of his own eyes and the copper taste on the back of his throat. 

It had taken such a long time to glue himself back into something that resembled the Dean of before. He's pretty sure that he hasn't really settled into that shape since. What he does, the ways that he copes, it doesn't work. Not really. It gets him by, and if all Dean is ever looking for is survival, then yeah, he's somewhere in the neighborhood of managing. 

This place, this spell, is breaking him again. It's all too much, too out there, and Dean can't seem to wrap all of the complicated things he's feeling up into his usual ropes of self-hatred. He can't just coil them up around the fence post and walk away. 

John used to hit him. Not just hit him - a good number of times he'd beaten Dean all to hell. And for what? Because he was drunk? Because he missed his dead wife and their sham of a marriage? Because he was so angry and frustrated with himself and his inability to look out for his own family that he put that on Dean instead, made Dean his whipping boy? 

Other than maybe a few slaps, John had never hit Sammy. Dean wouldn't let him hit Sammy, was always in the way, always taking the fall. But it wasn't like John had really tried, anyway. He'd clearly loved Sam, clearly felt a need to keep him safe. There was something about Dean, though, that seemed to set him off. Maybe it was just that Dean was older, old enough in John's eyes to become a partner, a confidante, a soldier. Maybe it was that Dean really did look like his mother, that as a child he'd been too pretty, too feminine, for John to bear. Maybe John had somehow guessed that Dean wasn't going to end up straight. Whatever it was, he'd done more than try to toughen Dean up. 

And Dean still couldn't hate him. He never could. Partly because Dean had to believe that his dad had loved him, that in another life he would have been the kind of parent who could love his sons as children. Partly because deep in some long-forgotten recess of Dean's core, Dean knows that his anger and pain as a child had had nowhere else to go. If he didn't hate himself, he would have had to hate John, and he just couldn't do that. If he ever stopped believing that he deserved to be hurt, then he might have wanted to hurt John. Even now, that thought scares Dean. 

And now, in this place, watching his demon self casually murder humans, Dean can't help but understand that all that self-hatred, that sense that he wasn't enough, would never be enough, it's wrapped up so tightly inside him because it all goes back to that dumb little kid with a blue ball in a hotel room in Kansas. 

It's not like he blames John for everything that came after. Not everything. But this feeling that Dean has all the time, this need in him to _fix_ things, to save people, to do anything to prove that he's worth his own life, it started there. Everything that's happened since, the subsequent beatings, the molestation and assault, every failure and abandonment and loss, it's all just tinder on that first spark. 

When the memory of demon-Dean's exploits fades and drops them in the room with the doors, Dean finds his cheeks are wet. The sixth door is already smoldering, and as Dean and Cas step back from it, it goes up in flames, the number above it replaced with a charred X. 

Cas blinks in surprise, which maybe should offend Dean but he's just too worn out to care. Cas turns to him and sees that he's crying, again, and he makes as if to reach out for Dean, but then stops. Like he's not sure if he's supposed to. Like he's not sure he's allowed to. 

Honestly, it would be funny, if Dean had the energy to unwrap that pile of irony. 

The entire room shakes. Dean jumps and Cas jerks his head up to look towards the ceiling. The walls are rumbling. 

"Oh for fuck's sake," Dean says, because he hasn't even dried his damn tears. He grabs Cas by the arm and pulls the seventh and final door open. They are out of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Content Warnings: Brief mention of past sexual abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, self-hatred, murder (but in a canon-typical way)
> 
> The speaker Scott Fried once came to my college and in his talk he said "Sometimes we don't tell our therapists things, because if we told our therapist at least one other person would know: we would know" and it's been rattling around in my head ever since so here we are.


	6. Coda/Hopes so High (Door Seven)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings in end notes

Dean blinks in the sunlight. It's a park he doesn't recognize, a time he can't place. It's a beautiful fall day, crisp but not cold, the sun high and bright in the blue sky. It takes a second for Dean to find himself, and when he does his eyebrows draw together. 

The other Dean is sitting on a park bench, and he looks too much like now-Dean. Older, actually. There are deeper wrinkles around his eyes and something off about his face that now-Dean can't place. 

"What is this?" Dean says. "This isn't a memory." 

"Is it a dream?" Cas asks. 

Dean shakes his head. It's not a dream he remembers, anyway. 

This older Dean is reading a well-worn copy of Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_ with one hand, his other hand braced on the stroller sitting in front of him. Before now-Dean even thinks to peer inside, there is a soft sound. Older Dean drops his book onto the bench and bends over, reaching into the stroller with a soft "Good afternoon, sleepyhead." 

Dean lifts a baby boy, maybe six months old, into his arms, letting the swaddling blanket drop back into the stroller. The boy is crying a little as he wakes up from his nap, but as Dean holds him upright and grins at him, his eyes focus and a smile breaks across his face as he recognizes Dean. 

"Hey little monster," Dean says, balancing the baby on his knees and bumping their noses together. The little boy reaches up and grabs a fistful of Dean's hair. Dean leans forward and blows a raspberry into the belly of the baby's onesie overalls. The boy giggles, full of absolute delight, and Dean laughs at his laughter. The love in this Dean's eyes is so obvious it's painful. 

The baby looks a little like Dean remembers Sammy at that age. 

Now-Dean stares at the baby, his heart racing. He doesn't know what this is - a dream, a vision, a look into the future. 

Is that supposed to be his son? 

It's true that Dean has thought about kids for a long time. He always sort of assumed, if he ever somehow got out of hunting, that he'd want to be a father. He'd practically raised Sam, after all, and he'd loved Ben so ferociously. He'd wanted that for a long, long time. 

But staring at the baby giggling and grabbing on to this other Dean's fingers, all now-Dean can feel is a ramping anxiety. If this spell is trying to show Dean what it thinks he wants to see, it's wrong. Dean _can't_ raise a kid - he can't bring a child into this world. Not like this. Probably not ever. He's too… he's fucked up. And the world's fucked up too. And all Dean can see, looking at this baby, is the look on Sammy's face when he'd dropped dead on his knees that first time. 

Dean knows in a detached sort of way that being four years older in traumatizing circumstances does not the most stable parent make, knows that he's not a kid anymore, but he remembers all of the ways he's failed Sam and it makes his gut clench and twist. He remembers shoving Ben, remembers the desperate grief in him when Ben and Lisa were hurt, that desperation that drove him to make such an invasive, unconscionable decision to wipe their memories. He remembers how deeply he had known, in his bones, that they would be better off without him. 

He will mess this up. He will mess this kid up, no matter how hard he tries. In fact, maybe that's half the problem: Dean loves too hard. He knows this thing he's always had with Sam is… well, codependent. He knows it's only a slightly healthier reflection of his own relationship with their dad. Dean doesn't know how to do anything without going all in. And he knows, too, that you can't put that on a child. 

He can already tell, from looking at older Dean, and from the clawing ache he feels in his own chest, that he would do absolutely anything for this baby. He'd die and kill for him, he'd move Heaven, Hell, and earth. 

It scares Dean, what he's willing to do for his family. 

"Hey!" 

Both Deans turn to look, and there's Sammy loping up the grass toward him. He's older too. Softer. He's wearing a gray sweater and glasses. 

Now-Dean's first thought is to wonder how long he's needed those, if he should drag Sammy to an eye clinic when he wakes up. 

Sam reaches the park bench and grins, holding out his arms. 

"Hey, who's that?" Dean asks the baby in his lap. "Who's that big tree talking to us?" 

The baby looks over Dean's shoulder and his smile this time is absolutely beatific. He squirms, reaching out his own arms for Sam too, and Dean passes him over. 

Sam tosses the boy up in the air and catches him against his chest, making him giggle again. He kisses the side of his face, unbearably gentle and sweet. 

"Hey baby," he says. "Did you keep your uncle out of trouble while I was gone?" 

Now-Dean's chest aches all the harder, but his stomach stops roiling with anxiety. 

His _nephew._ Sam's son. Sam as a father. Dean as an uncle.

It hurts in such a profound, unnameable way. It hurts like wanting. 

"He only just woke up. Must have seen his father looming on the horizon." 

"Oh yeah? Did you wake up just in time for daddy?" Sam asks his son, and he signs "Father" in ASL. 

At six months, the baby doesn't exactly have fine motor control, but he touches one pudgy little hand to his own forehead, mimicking the motion. 

"Good job, buddy! Can you say 'uncle'?" Sam signs the word, and the baby waves his fist around in the air, smiling. 

Sam kisses his cheek again. "Well, close enough." 

Sam teaching his son sign language as he learns it himself is the cutest fucking thing in the world. Now-Dean could punch his brother, it's so goddamn adorable. 

The baby looks back at Dean and reaches his arms back out. And now-Dean knows, without exactly knowing how he knows, that this is one of the baby's favorite games, to be passed back and forth between Sam and Dean like a ball. 

"Aw," older Dean says, taking the baby and smooching the top of his head. "Little Deanlette doesn't have to say it, he knows who his uncle is." 

Sam mock-grimaces. "You have got to stop calling him that," he says. 

"Hey, if you don't like it you shouldn't have named him after me while I'm still alive. I can't just call him _Dean_. He's our little Deanlette Isaiah Winchester, aren't you?" 

The baby just smiles up at him. 

"Hey, do you remember how you used to call me DeeDee?" 

Sam laughs - it's startled, more of a guffaw than a giggle, but it's nearly as delighted as his son's laughter. It nearly breaks now-Dean's heart all over again. He hadn't realized how long it's been since he heard Sam laugh like that. How heavy his expression has been for years now. "I did not." 

"Yeah, you did," Dean insists, grinning. "God, you must have been one and a half? You'd just started walking and you'd toddle around after me screaming it if I didn't pay you attention." Dean tosses his nephew up into the air, not quite letting go as he swings him up and back down. "So you make sure to do the same to him, huh, Deanlette? Fair's fair." 

Now-Dean remembers, it had practically been Sammy's first word. He remembers Sam's first steps too, how he'd stood braced against a coffee table and then toddled straight to Dean. And Dean remembers the rush of warmth he'd felt even then, the protectiveness and pride. Dad had been there too, but Sam had chosen Dean, had always gone to Dean first, even when his brother was just a runty little five or six years old. 

Sam shakes his head, still smiling softly, and bends over the stroller, checking that everything's in order. "Thanks for watching him, anyway." 

"Anytime. How's the missus?" 

And Jesus. Sammy married, with a kid. Now-Dean has thought a lot about this too, of course, imagining Sam living out some normal boring life on the West Coast or something. But the truth is that he never thought he'd live to see it. 

"Good. She's good. Are you and Cas gonna make it over for Shabbat this week?" 

"Sure, wouldn't miss it. Any excuse to eat your toes." Dean says this last to the baby, tugging at his sock-covered feet. "Are toes Kosher, anyway?" 

"Interesting. I'll ask." Sam takes his baby back and tucks him into the stroller, securing the straps around him while his son waves to Dean only two feet away on the bench. Dean waves back and makes ridiculous faces until the baby laughs again. 

"Okay buddy, I think we are all set." Sam looks around, as if he is in the habit of forgetting things. "Thanks again. See you Friday?" 

"See you Friday." Dean stands and gives his brother a quick one-armed hug. Now-Dean thinks about how easy it looks, quick and affectionate and familial. There's usually something desperate and grieving in touch for Dean. There's a lump in his throat at the thought that he and Sammy are somewhere in life that lets them both trust this won't be the last hug. 

Now-Dean is expecting this vision, whatever it is, to fade, but instead he finds himself following this older Dean out of the park. 

"What the hell," Dean says to Cas as they follow other-Dean to the Impala waiting in the parking lot. "This isn't even a dream I've had, man. I thought this was supposed to be demons of my past or whatever." 

Cas frowns as they slide into the backseat of the Impala. " _Through seven doors shall he pass, and not until the last will he make of himself a man worthy to set foot in my kingdom. Glory be to he who slays the demons of his own making, and woe to the guilty, who shall be damned to live out of the light,"_ he recites. "I don't know. I suppose this is all still a demon of your own making? Perhaps you'll do something… foolish." 

Dean grunts. He tries to tell himself it's not real, because already the thought of losing it, or even watching this version of himself lose it, is terrible. His anxiety revs back up. He cannot watch that baby die. 

None of this is real. It's all in his head. 

But God, it feels real. It feels like remembering forward, the way Dean gets little pieces of memory from the vision. 

Older Dean drives for a while. He turns on the radio, leaves it on a Queen song, and he fucking _whistles._

Now-Dean in the backseat studies his older self. This Dean looks happier than now-Dean can remember being in the last few years. It's not just that, though, not the lightness to him. He still looks tired, a little careworn. The thing that now-Dean couldn't identify about other-Dean falls into place. He's not exactly soft, not in the way that was so obvious about Sam. But this Dean… this Dean has been broken. Fully, utterly, strapped down and deconstructed. Now-Dean doesn't know when it happened, some time ago, maybe, but it has happened. Because this Dean, there is an openness to him that is unimaginable to now-Dean. The guy's wearing his heart on his fucking sleeve. And the only way that Dean can see any version of this being possible is if all of his walls are torn down, his cities burned, and he's put back together by shaky hands and cello tape. If he was broken down and came back somehow without regrowing his usual calluses, if he lived in a world where that kind of vulnerability wasn't going to get him killed. 

Older Dean pulls up in front of a house. It's not a _nice_ house, but it's got a little backyard and the neighborhood doesn't look too rough. Now-Dean and Cas watch as other-Dean opens up the trunk of the Impala. 

Dean's surprised to find that it's mostly filled with what seem to be groceries. There's a little wooden organizer cutting off the left hand corner from the rest of the trunk and in that bit of space there's still a bag of salt, a jug of holy water, three shotguns, rocksalt rounds, and a wooden box of charms. But other than that, it's just a bunch of bulging plastic bags. 

Older Dean gathers all of the bags in one go and shuts the trunk with his elbow. Now-Dean glances at his own waistband for the first time and is glad to see that he's still packing, at least. And then he doesn't quite know why he's glad, except that it wouldn't feel remotely real if he didn't at least carry a gun on him. 

But it's not real. It's not real. 

Older Dean leans an elbow against the doorbell, and now-Dean knows, remembering forward again, that he has keys to this place, but his hands are full. 

A teenage girl with a shaved head and the hollow cheeks of the chronically underfed opens the door. She smiles wide and steps back to let Dean in. 

"Hey kiddo," Dean says, kicking the door shut behind him. Now-Dean and Cas crowd in after him. 

The teenager turns and yells over her shoulder "Guys, Dee's here!" and she turns back to Dean and hugs him. 

Now-Dean can see it on the other Dean's too-open face, does not need the flash of future-memory to know that her affection hits him deep. The nickname and the hug both make his stomach warm. 

Older Dean can't really hug the girl while his hands are full. He pats her awkwardly on the back with the plastic bags. 

"Good to see you too, Annie," he says. "Let a guy put down his wares, huh? My arm ain't made of lead." 

Annie lets go of him, and Dean drops the bags there on the hallway floor. He reaches out and rubs the spiky blonde stubble of Annie's shaved head. 

A younger boy, around ten years old, comes racing around the corner, followed more slowly by two teenagers who look younger than Annie. They all break into smiles at the sight of Dean. 

The ten-year-old barrels right into him, his head only coming up to Dean's chest as he wraps his arms around him too. 

" _Dean,"_ he says, breathless, radiant with excitement. "Hey! Guess what! Dorothy says I can sign up for Taikwondo after school at the community center this year! She says I can't use the self-defense stuff you taught us in class or they'll think I'm _barbaric,_ but I bet it helps anyway, don't you think?" 

"Whoa, hey tiger," Dean says, extracting himself and rubbing this kid's considerably more shaggy head. "You get much bigger, you're gonna start bowling me over like that. Taikwondo, huh?" Older Dean rubs his chin and now-Dean can tell he's biting back the words that belong to John, still there on the tip of his tongue, disparaging anything but a mixed martial arts approach, or better yet, boxing. But that's not the point. 

"You make sure Dorothy invites me to your first match or whatever, yeah?" 

The kid beams up at Dean like he's his goddamn idol or something. 

Dean bends down and starts gathering the bags back up. "Okay," he says. "We've got canned goods, dry goods, perishables." He passes the bulk of the bags over to Annie. "Snacks." He tosses two bags at the ten-year-old who peers into them and grins wider. Dean rummages in the remaining bags and pulls out a bottle, tossing it to the teenage boy in the hallway. "Those are for Lucy. Prenatal vitamins. Make sure she takes them, and for God's sake, Sean, let one of us know the next time the two of you need a ride to her appointments."

Sean catches the bottle, turning it over in his hands and looking down at the floor as a blush creeps across his face. "Sorry," he says to the floorboards. "We didn't think the clinic was that far." 

"I know. But as far as I'm concerned if Lucy wants a ride down the block to Kwiktrip, I'll be there. Just call, okay?" 

"Okay." 

"The rest of this is mostly clothes and books, guys, nothing too exciting. Where's Charlie, anyway?" 

The other teenage girl next to Sean stifles a giggle. She's wearing her long dark hair down over her face and it doesn't quite cover up the scarring from what now-Dean feels pretty sure is an acid burn. 

"She and Dorothy are _making up_ ," she whispers. Dean gets the impression she always whispers. "They had a fight this morning. Abe was eavesdropping." 

"I was not," the ten-year-old says, turning bright red. "It's not _my_ fault the bathroom is next to their office." 

"Okay," Dean says hastily. "Well, I'm sure not going to interrupt them. I can't stay long anyway. Will one of you guys just let them know this stuff is here?" He drops the remaining bags to the side of the hall. 

Now-Dean is just trying to take it all in. The way the kids look at this version of him, hanging on his words. The food, the clothes, the prenatal vitamins, this ragtag bunch of kids… 

Again, without quite knowing how, Dean knows that the kids call this place a safe house, but that Charlie calls it "The Dean Winchester Home for Wayward Children." He knows that when they'd first started doing this work, when Charlie had turned up with a couple of dirty, tired, queer runaways and asked him to help her find a place for them, that Dorothy had gone to school and gotten her MSW, even though Dean had grumbled and insisted they didn't need a _therapist._

Of course they did, though. Dean and Charlie cannot possibly fill that role and Sam's involved, but he's not always around to offer his sad, understanding eyes. Plus, Dean is good at finding the kids who've been through the worst, and he's not self-centered enough to think that he can really help them with their trauma. Not in that way. 

And it's… 

Now-Dean gets it. 

He gets it, and it's as cruel as the rest of this spell. 

Because of course. Of course one of his own demons is the things he wants. The darkest, most desperate desires of his heart. 

It's Sammy - safe and happy, out of the life. With a wife and a son that he's named after his brother, a baby that Dean gets to dote on without being fully responsible for. It's having Sam near enough to see, to check up on, but somehow being able to let him go, just a little. Just enough for them to find out who they are without each other. 

It's this - Dean helping other kids, helping people in a way that is not hunting, a way that is not using his body or sacrificing himself. It's providing for kids who can't help but remind him of himself and Sam. It's working with Charlie, using his years of cheating the system to circumvent all kinds of roadblocks to setting up this house. It’s their connections with community outreach programs, and finding the kids who really need it. 

Now-Dean balls his hands into fists as anger rushes through him. He wants to punch this vision of himself for thinking he can just have this. For being open in a way that makes now-Dean feel naked and vulnerable. 

This isn't real. It's never going to be real. And maybe Dean should at least hope that there's a Dean out there in the multiverse for whom it might be true, but he can't. The idea that there is any version of himself that gets to have this, that could ever deserve this, is too far for him. 

Hot, angry, jealous tears spill down now-Dean's cheeks and he bites his tongue, trying to hold it all in. 

"Dean," Cas says. He puts out a hand and Dean practically leaps back from him, even though he's already crammed up against the corner behind the door. Cas gets the message and lowers his hand slowly, visibly, like you would to a scared animal. 

It's just that if anyone touches Dean right now, he thinks he might shatter like glass. That he might break in a way that is unfixable. 

"When is Cas gonna come by?" Abe asks with a slight whine to his voice. "We haven't seen him in ages." 

Older Dean smiles. "Wasn't he here last Thursday?" 

"Yeah, exactly, _ages._ " 

"Okay, okay. I'll make sure he gets his ass down here over the weekend. Listen, speaking of, I gotta get over to work, but tell the rest of the gang I said hi, alright?" 

Cas and now-Dean follow the other Dean back out to the Impala without speaking. They drive for awhile again, back the way they came, and then onto a highway for a few minutes before taking an exit that takes them out past a farm and then to an empty looking building that sits at the junction of a crossroads. 

Dean's heart rate picks up a little. Maybe this is where it all becomes a nightmare again. Maybe this other-Dean cracked and sold his soul for a few years of normalcy, for protection for Sam and the others. It doesn't sound impossible. 

But Older Dean just parks the Impala in a spot outside the building and unlocks its front door with one of the keys on his keychain. 

The building doesn't look like much from the outside, at least not yet. There's no sign, no indication that it's a business, but inside it's an almost finished bar. 

Now-Dean takes a deep breath as this vision or future or wish fulfillment Dean shrugs off his jacket and throws it over a bar stool. The layout is different, but the bar is clearly an homage to The Roadhouse. It hasn't even opened and already Dean can smell it, what Ash called "Bud, blood, and beer nuts." 

There's an old Jukebox behind the pool tables, and older Dean puts a handful of quarters in, smiling to himself as he puts on back to back classic rock. Then he rolls up the sleeves of his flannel and goes behind the bar. He pours himself a half-glass of whiskey and sips it while he does inventory. The blackboard above his head already has weekday specials listed on it. Monday's special is the "Misty Mountain Hops" IPA, Tuesday's is a cocktail called "Sammy's Bad Day" which seems to be a vodka tonic with too many olives, Wednesday features a nightmarish mix of Jaeger and Coca-a-Cola which Dean has apparently chosen to call "Coda," Thursday is half off pints from the local brewery, and Friday's is "Hunter's Helper" which is just a full glass of bottom shelf whiskey. 

Guns N' Roses' _Welcome to the Jungle_ comes on just as the front door to the bar opens. Dean looks up from behind the bar and his easy grin reaches his eyes, giving too much away. 

The Cas who just walked into the bar is older too. Now-Dean thinks, somewhat disjointedly, that it sort of suits him. This Cas looks kinder, more settled into his skin. Still tired, they're all still tired, but like maybe he hasn't had to kill anyone this week. 

"Hey," Dean says. 

"Hello Dean," Cas says, like he always does. He pulls out the bar stool that Dean had set his jacket on earlier and sits down, the same old trench coat still on his shoulders. Without asking, he picks up Dean's cup of whiskey and takes a drink, raising his eyebrows across the bar at Dean. 

"Already sampling the wares, are we?" 

Dean grins back at him, unfazed and downright impish. "Hey man, perks of the trade. Relax, I bought the bottle. Thought it'd be good to have on hand while we get through the last leg. You want?" 

"No, thank you, I'm fine." Cas takes an appraising look around. "Will we be ready for the grand opening?" 

Huh. 

_We._

Now-Dean sneaks a look at the Cas standing next to him. He's tilting his head to one side, wearing his confused-puppy-dog look. Dean knows he can count on Cas at this point, but he cannot imagine a more useless business partner. Hell, Sam would be more helpful in running the books. Or Charlie, although she seems busy with their other work. Still, the thought of working with Cas, of apparently opening a bar with him, a _hunter bar_ … It has its appeal. 

Older Dean runs his hand along the bar as he comes around to the front. "Sure, she's coming along just fine. Just need to get our license up, set up the last tables, and we'll be good to go." 

The Cas at the bar frowns. "I don't understand your need to give inanimate objects a human gender," he says. "Why does it always have to be a 'she'?" 

"Because she's a _lady,_ Cas." Dean trails his fingers along the bar as he walks over to join him. "And we're gonna treat her like one." 

Cas swivels the stool around to face Dean. "You're going to fill this bar with travel-worn hunters and your gutterpunk orphans. How is that treating her like a lady?" 

It's funny enough to hear Cas say "gutterpunk" that now-Dean almost laughs. 

"Okay, fine, we're gonna treat her like a tough old broad. First drunk idiot who breaks a window gets tossed through it, though." Older Dean is still smiling, still giving too much away. And it's true that they've never had the most normal sense of personal space, but this Dean is standing so close to this Cas that he's practically straddling his knees. It's weird and embarrassing. 

Cas doesn't seem to notice though. He's let go of his quietly disgruntled frown. "So have you decided what you're going to name her, then?" 

Dean mock-groans. "This is the hardest choice I've ever made." 

Cas snorts. It's an endearing sound. "Right." 

"What about Slaughterhouse-66?" 

"Do you want us to have any customers?" 

"Mm. House of the Holy is too on the nose at this point. Thought about The Stagecoach, but it doesn't seem right this far East." 

"I don't see why you don't just call it Winchester's. It would make it clear to other hunters." 

"I told you," Dean says, and leans in even closer to Cas, braces one hand on the back of the stool. Now-Dean stares at the way their bodies are aligned. 

Wait. What?

"That's too much advertisement to everyone else. Besides, it's _our_ place, not just mine. How about Two Dumbasses?" Older Dean's grin is back, and Cas smiles up at him, about a foot separating their faces at this point. 

"Hm," Cas says. "How about Trust? Less dumb, less ass." 

"Y'know," Dean says thoughtfully. "I don't hate that. Trust. Huh." 

"You don't think it's a stupid name for a bar?" 

This Dean is so transparent, the way he looks at Cas. "It's stupid for the right reasons," he says, grin impish again, throwing Cas' words back at him. 

Cas takes hold of Dean's shirt front and pulls him down onto his lap, leaning up to kiss him on the mouth. 

Now-Dean is frozen. Because… _what?_

Older Dean goes with it easily, like this isn't new or weird at all, like they've done this a hundred times. He straddles Cas' thighs, arching his body into him like a damn teenager. He's laughing into the kiss, his smile meeting Cas' mouth, his arms going around Cas' neck. And Cas' hands keep hold of Dean's shirtfront, possessive and eager. It isn't until Dean's hands are in Cas' hair and Cas has snaked one arm around Dean's waist with his other hand sliding first up his thigh then around to his ass, until Dean's no longer laughing against his mouth but kissing him deep, like he means to keep kissing him until one of them dies or their clothes come off, whichever comes first, that the vision finally starts to fade and blur. 

Now-Dean can't move. He can't think. He's still completely frozen in what is either shock or embarrassment or shame, or some combination of it all. 

Holy fucking shit. 

He can feel Cas staring at him but he cannot make himself turn his head to look.

And okay. Yeah. In the moments when Dean's been very sleepy or very drunk, or both, when it's just been him and Cas and Dean's eyes have fluttered open just before nodding off, when he's seen Cas watching his face like that with the kind of tenderness that he had for the younger Deans, Dean has had the half-dreaming thought that he kinda wished Cas was closer. Like fingers in his hair close. Laying next to him close. Kissable close. But that's… Dean always tells himself that's just his lizard brain, his half-asleep mind just wishing he was cuddling someone. He tells himself it isn't about Cas, because Jesus. That is all a bad, bad, bad idea. Even if Cas was… even if he did… Dean is poison. He's ruined everything he's ever touched. He just can't help himself. 

And okay, yes, he did also just try to kiss Cas like an hour ago, but that didn't count. That was just Dean panicking. Even Cas had recognized that was just panic. 

That doesn't mean this is what he _wants._

Is this what he wants? Him and Cas, business partners, the other kind of partners? 

Sam saying "you and Cas" like they were a unit, inviting them to Shabbat dinners with him and his wife. The kids at the house, asking him about Cas like Dean was his keeper. 

The way Cas had smiled up at him and pulled him in. The way Dean had let himself be kissed. 

Jesus fucking Christ. 

The room with the doors is still shuddering, rumbling, in the midst of a collapse. The door in front of them is solid, the number 7 above it whole and unmarked. 

Dean makes himself turn his head and meet Cas' wide eyes. Cas looks absolutely wretched, which is something of a surprise. Dean was expecting anger or disgust, or at least basic confusion. 

But maybe this is better. Maybe Cas looks so distraught because he feels bad that he can't return those feelings between the other Cas and Dean. 

Dean tries to reconcile himself to that, because, well, it would be okay. If he can still keep his best friend, it'll be better than anyone could reasonably ask for after… that. It's not like he expects anything from Cas, not like he'd ever ask anything from him. Dean doesn't even know how to feel about this spell thinking that _Cas_ is one of the deepest and most desperate desires of his heart. 

Well. 

He does know how he feels about it. He's too raw and cracked open not to know how he feels. But if they can just get through this and wake up, he's pretty sure he can kill that with alcohol and several solid weeks of avoiding Cas. 

Cas clears his throat. His eyes are slightly wild. "I…" he tries, then starts again. "Dean, I'm sorry." 

Dean blinks. The walls are shaking and cracking around them. Dust settles over them both and Dean coughs. 

“I didn’t want Sam to come because I thought his human consciousness might affect yours, especially when so many of your memories are shared. I thought there was a good chance that his memories might start to influence yours, but I was sure my own… I was certain that nothing in my head should be able to penetrate yours. I don’t know how it could, you’d have to translate it out of Enochian to even get in… But it must have, to… Perhaps if we tried going through the door again it would correct to what you should have seen. I didn't mean to…" Cas trails off awkwardly, gesturing vaguely with both hands. 

Which… _what?!_

"What the hell are you talking about, man?" Dean stares at Cas, whose expression is something close to desperate. "What are you…" 

"You're not going to be able to 'conquer' the seventh door if its contents isn't of your own making. So for… for my feelings to have affected…" 

"Cas, you idiot." The emotion Dean is struggling with is too big for his concave chest. It's flickering out along his exposed nerves, electricity crackling in his live wires, potent with potential. 

It is unbearable. 

"That is all me. That's all _my_ shit. What, you think you," and Dean, driven by a hysterical desire, flicks Cas gently on the forehead. He blinks, surprised and confused. "Came up with a bar with drinks named after Zeppelin songs? You think you dreamt up us m… making out to _Communication Breakdown?_ Really? You think any of that came from your noggin?" 

It's all Dean can do to keep his voice from cracking. 

As the walls around them splinter and larger pieces of stone start to shake loose, Dean can't help but note how fucking fitting it is that they are having this conversation while his head is literally falling apart around them. He looks at the floor and he hates how quiet his next words come out. 

"Are you saying… Cas, are you saying that you could want something like that?" 

Besides the guttural rumbling around them, there is a moment of silence between them. 

It's only when Dean makes himself look up that Cas seems to shake himself out of his own shock. 

"Dean…" he says, and Dean's heart drops. Cas steps towards him. He takes Dean's face in his hands and his voice does crack. "You are the only thing I've ever wanted." 

Dean can't breathe again. 

"You are the most caring, loving man that I will ever know," Cas says, like it's just a fact. Like it's the weather. Like it's E=MC². "I have loved you since before I understood what it even meant to want at all. And I will love you in whatever way you will let me, throughout all modes of time." 

_Transcendent love._

Cas' hands on Dean's raw skin do what his whole self has been threatening to do since he first understood that the baby in his vision's arms belonged to Sam. Cas' touch breaks him, undoes that last knot tied at the very center of Dean's being, unmakes every rule and defense that has ever kept him safe. 

The seventh door is burning, but so is the rest of the room around them. 

And as it all comes crashing down, Dean _shatters._

*** 

There is an in between moment of darkness where Dean feels himself fracturing. He’s splintering across time. He’s breaking along all his fault lines: his failures as a son, a brother, a father, a friend; his losses; his sense of shame and worthlessness and being unclean; his tresspasses; his desires. He’s a scared little boy who has just lost his mother. He’s a trapped teenager, out of options and disgusted with himself. He’s twenty-something, losing Sam and losing Sam and losing Sam. He’s forty-something and meeting his new-born nephew for the first time, all pink and wrinkly and looking like a long-forgotten hope. He’s thirty-something and Cas is bringing in a kid off the street, saying “I want to help them,” and Dean has never known love like he feels for Cas in that moment. He’s in Hell, ripping and slicing and knowing himself to be the thing in the dark. He’s in Hell, being ripped and sliced and raped and sewn together to do it all over again and again and again. He’s alive and dead. Light and dark. Particle and wave. 

Dean is, momentarily, every self he’s ever been, and a few he’s not sure he has yet. He’s scattered and non-linear. He’s himself, just not cohesive. Not in order. 

There is a pulsing in what might be the space behind his eyes. 

Dean Winchester is all of these pieces, and none of them. He is made from his trauma, made from his choices and actions, made from his love. And he is something more than this, too. Whether he is good, or broken, or deserving, is besides the point. The sum of Dean’s parts is incalculable. Somewhere, in the pieces of all that he was and is and is yet to be, the squeezing sensation in Dean’s unhinged chest understands that this is what it means to be human. This is how he knows he’s still human. 

***

Dean heaves a gasping breath and blinks his eyes. They feel dry and it takes a second to bring things into focus. He’s laying on his bed - how he got there, who knows - and directly in his line of sight is Cas laying next to him. Cas is just opening his eyes, 

It’s not a conscious decision, really. It’s more like the culmination of so many years spent burying this thing that is now open and alive between them. 

Dean is so open. He feels more naked and vulnerable than he’s ever been. 

And even so, he pitches forward and kisses Cas, there in bed with him. For a second, Cas is too startled to respond, but then his hand comes up to the side of Dean’s face and he’s kissing him back and it’s… 

It’s so laced with love and wanting that Dean thinks he could die from it. 

Cas kisses sloppily, like a teenager, but it doesn’t matter because he presses so eagerly against Dean, his hands on him, and the feeling of it is like a current through Dean’s entire body. 

There is the sound of a throat clearing from the side of the bed. 

“Um,” Sam says. “So, looks like you two made it out okay then?” 

Dean springs back from Cas, can feel his entire body flushing, but Sam is already standing and backing hastily out of the room. 

“I’ll just, uh, let you guys work some things out,” he says, and disappears. Before Dean can do anything other than stare dumbly after him, Sam’s head reappears in the doorway and he is grinning wider than Dean’s seen in a long time. “Glad to have you back,” Sam says, and disappears again. Dean can hear him laughing to himself all the way down the hall, and it’s not quite the soft, delighted laughter from his vision of Sammy, but it’s close. It’s damn close. 

“Cas,” Dean says, turning back over to face him, his voice coming out rough. “Get the door.” 

Cas looks slightly apprehensive, but he waves his hand and the door to Dean’s bedroom closes. Dean rolls up onto one elbow so that he can look down at his best friend, this idiot that he’s decided to let ruin him. This person who has already put him back together once before. Dean kisses him again, and it’s so much. Too much. Dean absolutely aches with the feeling of it. He’s so raw and wrung out and cracked. But it’s Cas, who already knows everything now. Who loves him anyway, across time. 

“Dean,” Cas murmurs after several minutes of their mouths hot and frenetic against each other, their hands tangling and caressing and pulling. “I… What are we doing?” 

Dean presses his forehead to Cas’ and closes his eyes for a moment. When his voice comes out it’s choked. It’s as raw as he’s feeling. “I’m living in the light.” 

Later, when they are tangled up in each other, still fully clothed but Dean on his back with one arm under Cas, the side of his face pressed into his shoulder, and Cas curled into Dean with one arm wrapped over his chest, one leg thrown over Dean’s, Dean thinks to himself that he likes everything about this. 

He likes that he’s going to have to teach Cas some things, likes that Cas very enthusiastically has no idea what to do with his tongue, likes that Cas’ hands are big and warm and that his fingers are still trailing lightly over his chest. He likes that Cas already knows him. He likes that Sam, apparently, was not surprised in the slightest by this turn of events. He likes that the way Cas is looking at him now is the way Cas has always looked at him. 

Dean is faintly aware that at some point they are going to have to get up and face Sam’s smugness. He’s going to have to get back to the sanctuary now that he’s passed the trial and finish what he started. He may have rushed in headfirst, too locked in his own head to take the precautions that he should have, but there was still something there, something that the hunter network said was rumored to close the gates between Heaven and earth for any living angels. Dean didn’t know if they were going to use this thing or destroy it, but he’d been too preoccupied with the idea that Cas could be banished permanently that he’d run straight in. And now here they are. 

“One point of contention,” Dean says into the somewhat sleepy silence they’ve fallen into. 

“Yes?” 

“We’re not calling our bar Trust. I don’t care what dream-me said, it’s a stupid name.” 

Cas laughs softly into Dean’s hair. “Okay. Not stupid for the right reasons?” 

“Not right enough.”

“What do you propose?” 

Dean thinks about the work he wants to do with Charlie, all of the things he’s going to work towards. He thinks about himself, and Sam, and Cas, their little broken, good, family. He thinks about himself and Cas, all the points where they’ve missed each other and now, finally, the way that they’ve come home. 

Dean smiles and runs his hand up Cas’ arm. The weight and warmth of it feels like an anchor, like protection. 

“What do you think about Wayward Sons?” 

* * *

## Author's Note 

Hi folks, thanks for reading and to everyone who has commented. One comment equals one drop of serotonin, which, y'know, in this economy... 

Just a couple of quick end notes: You can't fix people, and you also can't save them from themselves. Dean deserved the agency to choose whether or not he confronted his own past and issues, but, unfortunately, I am a cruel and capricious god. Which is just to say, not dealing with trauma may not be healthy, but this ain't necessarily healthy either. 

  
If you're looking for texts on trauma outside of fanfiction, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is pretty good - definitely written from the perspective of a therapist more than someone who has personally dealt with trauma in their life, but overall a good treatment of the subject. Basically every content warning you can think of for it, though, so approach with care. 

I hope you are all taking care of yourselves right now. 

(P.S. This fic exists outside of space and time. It is free-floating through canon. Clearly sometime after season 9, with events from at least season 12 mentioned, but where are Jack and Mary? Are they not in Dean's head because their wounds are too new to have deeply seated in his consciousness? Did I mean to write this post-season 8 and then forget about them when I decided to put in Cas' deaths because I have not watched the show since season 9? Who can say!)

***   
Title notes: In Through the Out Door - Led Zeppelin Album   
Seven Stars and Seven Lampstands - reference to the Book of Revelations   
Fool in the Rain - Led Zeppelin song 

The Visible Reminder of Invisible Light - T.S. Eliot's poem "The Rock".

Liberty is the Soul's Right to Breathe - This is a Henry Ward Beecher quote, but it's also quoted in "Good Will Hunting" (also in this chapter, the Wes Anderson film mentioned is "Rushmore")   
The Nicest Angel You Have - Lilo & Stitch   
Coda/Hopes so High - Led Zeppelin album/lyric from "I Can't Quit You Baby (Coda)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Content Warnings: Brief mention of past physical, emotional, and sexual abuse


End file.
